Biilmann: AI-driven ephemeral apps make scale-to-zero serverless databases essential
Matt Biilmann · Agent Experience: Building an Open Web for the AI Era · Mar 7, 2025 · at 35:22
Matt Biilmann is the CEO and co-founder of Netlify. He is discussing how AI agents creating ephemeral, short-lived web applications alter database infrastructure needs.
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“Maybe if you had asked me two years ago about serverless databases, right? Like, I would tell you that, like, I don't really think, like, I've looked a lot at it, and I think it's like, kind of like, Scale to zero for a database just doesn't matter that much. Like once people have data in it, they never want it to scale to zero, right? Like, why would you do that? Should you want it to scale up, but like not, you never really scale it down, right? Like in reality, right? Like, but suddenly with these, like, Agent driven, like with that level of 10,000 sites a day from those and us and so on, right? Like, and this just being the beginning, right? Like, as you start seeing this emergence of like, hey, let's just write an app for that, right? Like, and you get almost ephemeral applications and so on, right? Like, because like, why not fire up an app to solve a problem? Suddenly that whole idea of like an ephemeral serverless database makes a ton of sense, right? Like, and we'll give the best experience of like, You fire it up, and if you need to scale, you can do it, but like you also, you actually suddenly need to scale to zero, right? Like, so that's an example of a primitive I can see now making total sense that actually like five years ago didn't make a lot of sense.”
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