🍌 What is Telegram Serverless? ⚫️ Telegram started testing Serverless back in the spring — a feature

🍌 What is Telegram Serverless?

⚫️ Telegram started testing Serverless back in the spring — a feature that lets developers run bots directly on Telegram’s infrastructure. A few days ago, Serverless got an update, and developers can now deploy full Mini Apps the same way.

⚫️ In short, Telegram is offering to host Mini Apps directly on its own infrastructure. Developers only need to build the project and deploy it with a single command. The frontend then gets its own address on the tgcloud.ai domain.

⚫️ For smaller teams, that could make things significantly easier. Launching a simple Mini App no longer necessarily means finding and paying for separate hosting. That could reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs, leaving more time and money to focus on the product itself. At least in theory: Serverless is still in beta and isn’t available to everyone yet.

⚫️ Some developers have already started experimenting with it. Mr. Freeman, the creator of Tonnel Marketplace, for example, has partially moved his marketplace frontend onto Telegram’s infrastructure and is now testing whether he can ditch separate hosting altogether.

💀 There is one obvious downside, though: in its current form, Serverless doesn’t solve the problem of domain blocking. A local ISP could simply block tgcloud.ai, potentially taking every serverless Mini App hosted on that domain offline with it. Let’s see whether Telegram comes up with a way to hide or abstract that address away.

@thedailyton