sst VS aws-cdk

We see some great results from using these in conjunction with frameworks such as SST or Serverless, and also some real spaghetti from people who organically proliferate 100’s of functions over time and lose track of how they relate to each other or how to update them safely across time and service. Buyer beware!

> But if you have a sufficiently large enough API surface, doing one lambda per endpoint comes with a lot of pain as well. Packaging and deploying all of those artifacts can be very time consuming, especially if you have a naive approach that does a full rebuild/redeploy every time the pipeline runs.

Yeah, thankfully SST [0] does the heavy lifting for me. I've tried most of the solutions out there and SST was where I was the happiest. Right now I do 1 functions per endpoint. I structure my code like url paths mostly, 1 stack per final folder, so that the "users" folder maps to "/users/*" and inside I have get/getAll/create/update/delete files that map to GET X/id, GET X, POST X, POST X/id, DELETE/id. It works out well, it's easy to reason about, and deploys (a sizable a backend) in about 10min on GitHub Actions (which I'm going to swap out probably for something faster).

I agree with the secrets/permissions aspect and I like that it's stupid-simple for me to attach secrets/permissions at a low level if I want.

I use NodeJS and startup isn't horrible and once it's up the requests as very quick. For my needs, an the nature of the software I'm writing, lambda makes a ton of sense (mostly never used, but when it's used it's used heavily and needs to scale up high).

[0] https://sst.dev

We will start by building a project with SST that provisions an API Gateway, a Lambda, and an S3 bucket. Once implemented, we'll look into testing for concurrent write conflicts or exceeding capacity limits.

I recently deployed a node websocket server using the SST Service construct. Until this point my stack had been functions and buckets. While I had no users 😢, I also had no costs 🤡.

Most my personal and side-business projects have very spiky load or just low load in general. Because of that I love using AWS Lambda as my backend since it scales to 0 and scales to whatever you have your limits set at.

I use SST [0] for my backend with NodeJS (TypeScript) and Vue (Quasar) for my frontend. For my database I use either Postgres or DynamoDB if the fit is right (Single Table Design is really neat). For Postgres I like Neon [1] though their recent pricing changes make it less appealing.

[0] https://sst.dev

[1] https://neon.tech

Yup. Entire core business product for a succeeding startup, though it's a small team of contributors (<10), and a much smaller platform team. Serverless backend started in 2018. Been a blessing in many regards, but it has its warts (often related to how new this architecture is, and of course we've made our own mistakes along the way).

I really like the model of functions decoupled through events. Big fan of that. It's very flexible and iterative. Keep that as your focus and it's great. Be careful of duplicating config, look for ways to compose/reuse (duh, but definitely a lesson learnt) and same with CI, structure your project so it can use something off-the-shelf like serverless-compose. Definitely monorepo/monolith it, I'd be losing my mind with 100-150 repos/"microservices" with a team this size. If starting now I'd maybe look at SST framework[0] because redeploying every change during development gets old fast

I couldn't go back to any other way to be honest, for cloud-heavy backends at least. By far the most productive I've ever been

Definitely has its warts though, it's not all roses.

[0] http://sst.dev

Along the way, you find an excellent framework, SST. Which is much faster than CDK and provides a better DX1. Here is how you then define your MultiPipelineStack.

SST is a powerful framework that simplifies the development of serverless applications. It offers a straightforward and opinionated approach to defining serverless apps using TypeScript. Built on top of AWS CDK, SST handles the complexity of setting up your serverless infrastructure automatically. SST is an open-source framework and is completely free to use.

SST is an open-source framework designed to facilitate the development and deployment of Serverless stacks on AWS. It operates under the hood by integrating with Amazon CDK. However, its primary benefit is in allowing us to concentrate on creating resources using familiar languages like TypeScript, treating them as Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

environment: Specifies the environment variable that will be available to our Lambda function. In this case I wrote an environment for RDS Database. Anyway, later I will write about AWS CDK using Python for creating database clusters, etc.

Today, I will show you how to build Amazon Location Service, which allows you to build location-based applications within your AWS environment using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and AWS CloudFormation. I will also show examples of the recently popular CDK Migrate and AWS CloudFormation IaC generator.

AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK): is an open-source software development framework to define your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages.

I am not one to build programming languages on a whim. In fact, I've spent the last five years building the AWS CDK, which is a multi-language library that addresses some of the challenges I am talking about by allowing developers to define cloud infrastructure using their favorite programming language.

I recently started exploring SST as an alternative to my favorite full-stack set consisting of Projen, AWS CDK, and React. I have been thoroughly impressed with the experience so far. In this article, I will demonstrate how to create a Next.js App Router S3 Picture Uploader using SST.

AWS CDK

For KMS 🔑, Each key is ~$1/mo, and with CDK, keys are generated on a massive scale, if not centralized.

Here is a github repository containing the code and instructions on how to automate this whole setup using AWS CDK.

Now that you have a working smart contract event listener, we'll deploy the resources to AWS using AWS CDK, which is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool. AWS CDK allows you to configure, deploy, and manage AWS cloud resources using popular programming languages such as TypeScript.

✨ Synthesis time: 14.44s CdkScheduledReportingStack: start: Building f3a91fb0ff1605e49b4b00aa223098d7a9a5307e98027f77aecc36bc05a4c3e7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: success: Built f3a91fb0ff1605e49b4b00aa223098d7a9a5307e98027f77aecc36bc05a4c3e7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: start: Publishing f3a91fb0ff1605e49b4b00aa223098d7a9a5307e98027f77aecc36bc05a4c3e7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: start: Building 517f907ce2318aa1a929b43bc1a0247ed509c92576c23a0a8aadfe1677f2ebd7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: success: Built 517f907ce2318aa1a929b43bc1a0247ed509c92576c23a0a8aadfe1677f2ebd7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: start: Publishing 517f907ce2318aa1a929b43bc1a0247ed509c92576c23a0a8aadfe1677f2ebd7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: success: Published 517f907ce2318aa1a929b43bc1a0247ed509c92576c23a0a8aadfe1677f2ebd7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: success: Published f3a91fb0ff1605e49b4b00aa223098d7a9a5307e98027f77aecc36bc05a4c3e7:current_account-current_region This deployment will make potentially sensitive changes according to your current security approval level (--require-approval broadening). Please confirm you intend to make the following modifications: IAM Statement Changes ┌───┬────────────────────────────────────────┬────────┬───────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ Resource │ Effect │ Action │ Principal │ Condition │ ├───┼────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ + │ ${SalesReportFunction.Arn} │ Allow │ lambda:InvokeFunction │ Service:events.amazonaws.com │ "ArnLike": { │ │ │ │ │ │ │ "AWS:SourceArn": "${Rule.Arn}" │ │ │ │ │ │ │ } │ ├───┼────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ + │ ${SalesReportFunction/ServiceRole.Arn} │ Allow │ sts:AssumeRole │ Service:lambda.amazonaws.com │ │ ├───┼────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ + │ ${SalesReportTopic} │ Allow │ sns:Publish │ AWS:${SalesReportFunction/ServiceRole} │ │ └───┴────────────────────────────────────────┴────────┴───────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────┘ IAM Policy Changes ┌───┬────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ Resource │ Managed Policy ARN │ ├───┼────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ + │ ${SalesReportFunction/ServiceRole} │ arn:${AWS::Partition}:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole │ └───┴────────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ (NOTE: There may be security-related changes not in this list. See https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/issues/1299) Do you wish to deploy these changes (y/n)?