architect VS serverless-application-model

I had been running dockeri.co with https://arc.codes/ for pennies a month.

Then, one month, I got a ~$500 bill out of no where.

Docker had changed an api causing my service to return 5xx errors all month. Each error was individually logged to CloudWatch - which racked up a ~$500 bill.

I moved to Cloudflare Workers that day and haven’t moved back.

We use https://github.com/architect/architect to test, provision and deploy the functional web app via GitHub Actions (…whenever they work ;). For the UI/UX we work with https://tailwindui.com and paid them for their great work.

I use https://arc.codes/ for deploying to AWS Lambda/API Gateway. It does a really good job with Remix and NestJS and is easy enough. I like that all I have to do is give a very simple config, and it builds the apps, zips the function code, uploads all my static assets, and then generates and deploys the CloudFormation. I am curious to migrate off as I do have to do some workarounds and it doesn't seem to have a ton of traction.

Not sure why this is downvoted, Fastify is quite popular and the 'generator for everything' approach of Koa didn't really take off.

Architect serverless (https://arc.codes) is pretty good for serverless.

Architect is a heavily opinionated framework for building FWA's, Functional Web Apps. It uses AWS SAM under the hood but provides a layer on top with simplified abstractions that lets developers define and use AWS infrastructure without necessarily knowing what service is backing their "events" construct.

I work for vercel but I highly recommend a host like us because we make it a lot easier to manage a lambda environment and being a lot more to the table (cdn, edge functions, etc). If you want to go your own I really like architect https://arc.codes too. It really depends on your traffic and application patterns but cold starts can be virtually nil.

It uses: - Remix for the frontend - Architect for the backend

Alternately, use Architect. Architect is a 3rd party developer experience that builds on top of AWS SAM. Architect includes a TypeScript plugin.

For us at Begin and Architect, tape has been in use for several years. tape has a stable and straightforward API, routine maintenance updates, and outputs TAP, making it really versatile. While TAP is legible, it's not the most human-readable format. Fortunately, several TAP reporters can help display results for developers. Until recently, Begin's TAP reporter of choice was tap-spec. Sadly tap-spec wasn't kept up to date and npm began reporting vulnerabilities.

The complete solution with SAM is available here.

There are many options to deploy Serverless Applications in AWS and one of them is SAM, the Serverless Application Model. I chose to use it here, because it doesn't add too many layers of abstraction between what's being deployed and the code we write and our infrastructure is quite simple.

The solution uses AWS SAM with the global configuration for Lambda functions and the public API you can use to access Apache Zeppelin. The stack deployment provides the URL as an output value.

When you combine this with the AWS Serverless Application Model you can also very easily include your dependencies. Or use a compiled language like golang for your Lambda functions. You simply run sam build before you run the aws cloudformation package and aws cloudformation deploy commands. SAM will build the binary and update the template to point to the newly built binary. Package will then upload it to S3 and replace the local reference to the S3 location. Deploy can then create or update the stack or you can use the CloudFormation integration in CodePipeline.

I'm a big fan of using an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach for any project. My go to tools for this are the Servlerless Application Model (SAM) and it's associated CLI (SAM CLI). For more official use cases and for cross platform apps I typically use Terraform.

AWS SAM

Kicking off the tour and not starting a war, but I'm going to be using the Serverless Application Model.

The diagram here is super simple. I'm going to write something a little later that shows how this code could fit into a bigger workflow, but for now, I'm keeping it basic. And yes, that's the SAM Squirrel in there.

Interestingly, AWS CDK and SAM are both explicitly mentioned. While CDK broadly addresses Infrastructure as Code, SAM is highlighted for its role in developing serverless data pipelines - a hugely underrated concept.

Naturally, there are several options available to declare your cloud resources. The options with the most popularity are the CDK, AWS CloudFormation, SST, Serverless framework, Terraform, and AWS SAM. There are others, but when talking about Infrastructure as Code (IaC), these are the ones you hear about most often.