Modal: artificial intelligence features and setup

Overview

Modal is a good fit when you need to run code, data jobs, or model tasks without managing permanent servers, including GPU use as needed. You write functions that scale with demand. Before moving customer processing to the platform, check startup times, per-minute costs, and where temporary files are stored. Flexible infrastructure does not remove the need to restrict access to secrets and data.

Features

• On-demand code execution on CPU and GPU
• Data jobs and AI tasks without a permanent server
• Deploying functions from a development environment to the cloud

Business uses

• Running a resource-intensive transcription task outside the website server
• Processing a batch of files without keeping a GPU running

Getting started

• Run a short test function without customer data.
• Measure startup time and the cost of a representative task.
• Check what happens if a task fails midway and if its result is written twice.

What to check

• Track GPU costs before running jobs on many files.
• Define what is deleted after a task and what is kept in the archive.