Modal

Modal is a serverless runtime for Python that lets you package code into containerized functions and run them with on demand scaling. Instead of managing servers, you define an application with Modal primitives and deploy functions that can be invoked from Python clients or exposed over the web for non Python callers. This is useful for ML inference endpoints, batch processing, and internal tools where workloads change over time. The platform documents web endpoints so deployed functions can be called via HTTP, and it supports scheduled execution through cron like workflows. For state and assets, Modal provides Volumes, described as a high performance distributed file system aimed at write once read many workloads such as storing model weights for inference. Operational needs are addressed through Secrets, which can be managed via dashboard, CLI, or Python and injected into running containers. This helps teams keep API keys and credentials out of code and logs. Pricing is published: the Starter plan has a $0 monthly fee plus compute usage and includes $30 per month in free credits with limited web endpoints and other starter limits. Modal fits developers who want to move Python workloads from laptop to production without building Kubernetes or bespoke infra, while still needing to understand usage based billing and platform limits.