sst VS aws-lambda-java-libs

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).

FaaS is specifically focused on building and running applications as a set of independent functions or microservices. Major cloud providers like AWS (Lambda), Microsoft Azure (Functions), and Google Cloud (Cloud Functions) offer FaaS platforms that allow developers to write and deploy individual functions without managing the underlying infrastructure.

So AWS Lambda is basically a serverless computing service that is offered by AWS. It enables developers to run the code in response to various events. It protects the developers from the pain of managing the servers. Using a serverless execution model helps the developers to handle provision, manage and scale the servers automatically. Through this approach the developers can fully focus on writing the code instead of dealing with other aspects.

The first product that popularized the term “serverless” was AWS Lambda, which is both the prototypical and archetypical function as a service provider. It also has a great name, which pings back to its envisioned place in the cloud of the future. In computer programming, a lambda, often referred to as a lambda function or lambda expression, is a concise way to represent an anonymous function, which is a function without a name. The concept originates from lambda calculus in mathematical logic and has been adopted by many programming languages, each with its own syntax and characteristics.

You can build a custom config rules in 2 ways, using AWS Lambda and CloudFormation Guard. Lambda gives you a lot of flexibility, but it also brings complexity of maintaining. CloudFormation Guard is a bit more lightweight in that regard. Yes, you still need to maintain the logic to determine when your resource is compliant or not. But you need to do this in both cases, thus my go to preference is CloudFormation Guard.

AWS Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

This blog details how you can use some key serverless components from AWS like Amazon Eventbridge, AWS Lambda, and Simple Notification Service to setup a system that will monitor your site (which can be running anywhere) and send emails, text messages, slack messages, and more when the reachability status of your site changes.

I use the OpenWeather API to receive the current temperature data by providing the latitude and longitude coordinates as query strings in the request. A Lambda function invokes the weather API and sends the current temperature value as a custom metric to CloudWatch. I then graph the temperature values on a dashboard and activate an alarm when the temperature sinks below zero degrees Celsius.

After two years, I moved to a Web3 startup where I was given a lead software engineer role. This new role gave me more hands-on experience with AWS, where I've learned to implement serverless technologies like Lambda and DynamoDB.

I discussed a way to control access to endpoints using JSON web tokens and a Lambda authorizer earlier.