That sort of behaviour definitely comes with some caveats, but probably works pretty well in a closed ecosystem.
A few years back we were using a service called PiCloud that effectively allowed you to do that. It went a whole lever deeper and actually bundled and shipped your local code to the remote runner so you could actually run a single function from your codebase remotely. It was a one of the best products I've used but a) their service was unreliable and b) the got acqui-hired (by Dropbox, I think).
and all the deps and everything would be shipped. Next time you called a function, if it already had everything it would be able to run remotely without shipping again.
It was so wonderful. And I was so disappointed that Multyvac (http://www.multyvac.com/) dropped the ball. I thought I'd be able to continue using the service ...
BTW, Multyvac has one of the more hilarious "trusted by" sections I've seen on the internet.
Aaron told me they were shutting down the service shortly before I was due to go on holiday. I looked at the multivac thing and decided it was just to risky to assume they would actually pick it up (especially given their Trusted By section!)
I spent a couple of weeks replacing it with celery, and then later RQ. It was the correct call, but you never know with these things. As far as it goes it was a pretty cheap lesson in not relying on external providers. Having said that, I've spent a fortune on EC2 since because I can't have micro billing like I could with picloud!
A few years back we were using a service called PiCloud that effectively allowed you to do that. It went a whole lever deeper and actually bundled and shipped your local code to the remote runner so you could actually run a single function from your codebase remotely. It was a one of the best products I've used but a) their service was unreliable and b) the got acqui-hired (by Dropbox, I think).
It was something simple like:
and all the deps and everything would be shipped. Next time you called a function, if it already had everything it would be able to run remotely without shipping again.