Serverless and containers solve overlapping problems. Both abstract away the work of managing operating systems. Both let teams deploy code without thinking about servers. Both scale on demand. The differences between them are the sort of thing that gets obscured in vendor marketing, where serverless is positioned as the future and containers as the past. The reality, at the point a team is making an architectural decision, is more pragmatic. This post is a decision framework for choosing between serverless and containers for a specific workload in 2026. Where serverless fits naturally Serverless is the correct choice when the workload has specific properties. Unpredictable or spiky traffic. Workloads that go from zero to high throughput and back frequently. Serverless pricing matches the usage shape; container pricing reflects the provisioned capacity even when idle. Event-driven glue. Short-lived tasks triggered by events — a file upload, a message on a queue, a scheduled job.…