Inquir Compute

Backend functions without Kubernetes as your daily UI

Functions and routes instead of cluster YAML—same isolation, less daily ceremony.

Situation

The gap teams feel

Kubernetes is the respectable answer for “real” infrastructure, yet a huge share of products mainly need HTTP entrypoints, something that fires on a schedule, and a place to drain background work.

Jumping straight to a cluster before those basics work slows early teams; refusing any structure leaves you rewriting shell scripts into microservices six months later.

Sharp edges

Why K8s-first hurts small surfaces

Someone has to own etcd backups, CNI quirks, and ingress certificates before the first customer feature ships.

GitOps and Helm are powerful, but they are heavy reading when your immediate need was “run this function every night”.

How Inquir fits

Middle ground

Inquir keeps the interface at functions and routes while still giving you containers, secrets, and history. You are not pretending serverless means “no isolation”.

If you later need a bigger orchestrator, the habits you built—small handlers, explicit triggers—translate more cleanly than a monolith split in a hurry.

Capabilities

Primitives you keep

Browser deploy

Edit, save, and ship without a local Docker dance for every change.

Gateway

Centralize auth and path rules for inbound HTTP.

Jobs + pipelines

Represent async work explicitly instead of hiding it in process forks.

Steps

How to ship backend functions on Inquir Compute

Skip Kubernetes as your daily control plane when routes and functions are enough.

Author

Start from templates for common HTTP and worker shapes.

Configure

Wire gateway routes or pipeline triggers; bind secrets to functions in the product, not in git.

Observe

Use execution history as the feedback loop for reliability work.

Code example

Focus stays on the handler

The unit of deployment is code plus metadata, not a chart per endpoint. Default routes use the simple event shape (`path`); AWS-style routes use `rawPath` instead.

handlers/echo.mjs

export async function handler(event) {
  const path = event.path ?? event.rawPath ?? '';
  return {
    statusCode: 200,
    body: JSON.stringify({ path }),
  };
}

Fit

Reasonable expectations

When to use

You want structure now without hiring a platform team first.
Your workloads map naturally to stateless handlers with explicit IO.

When not to use

You already invested in cluster-wide policy engines and CRDs as your primary interface.

FAQ

Is Kubernetes used under the hood?

You interact with Inquir’s UI and API; workers use Docker (and Firecracker microVMs on Linux when enabled). You are not asked to manage Kubernetes manifests to publish a function.

Can I still export to containers?

Yes. Think of containers as the isolation unit while your workflow stays function-centric.

How do I test locally?

Follow docs for local invocation patterns; keep parity with environment variables used in production.