By mid-2015, Uber’s rider growth coupled with its cadence of releasing new services, like Eats and Freight, was pressuring the infrastructure. To allow the decoupling of consumption from production, and to add an abstraction layer between users, developers, and infrastructure, Uber built Catalyst, a serverless internal service mesh.

Uber decided to build their own severless solution, rather that using something like AWS Lambda, speed for its global production environments as well as introspectability.