Ask HN: Is it advisable to develop a high-scale website using only AWS Lambda? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it advisable to develop a high-scale website using only AWS Lambda?

My company (big internet player) is about to create a new product that will scale up to millions of requests per day in 1 year. But, for starters, we are a very small team, with no dedicated DevOps. At this point, I'm considering leveraging AWS Lambda architecture for everything: from front-end web UI delivery to back-end event-driven jobs, at least for the initial stages (MVP) of product development. Is this too risky?

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Just mind that the tools and services around Lambda are getting better, but you will certainly be a relatively early-adopter. It will undoubtedly result in some extra time spent learning, but you'll also eliminate a number of critical operational concerns and concerns about scale.

Mind that Lambda will not handle state for you, functions are stateless. You'll need to store state into hosted services like DynamoDB, Firebase, S3, etc... or stand up (micro)services that manage that state (say, a PostgreSQL database in Docker, saving to an EBS volume).

I am exactly there in terms of MVP and team. We had an AWS connoisseur who left just after I joined. Tiny micro nano services all the way except his know-how didn't rubb off that well with the rest if the team which is new to the web dev altogether. That's one thing. The other being the sea of reinvented lock-in technology that AWS is. While support is quick to reply, you will face many "huh?" moments that have little to do with arguments and more to so with unapologetic opinion, especially API gateway and its integration with Lambda. It's for reasons like the above that we're experimenting now with a more mono architecture, replacing API gateway with Beanstalk for now, nginx later, but still run Lambdas in the background.

It's not that risky, specially for early-stage MVP or prototyping. In my opinion, serverless is the future, at-least for 90% of Web apps, APIs and device app backends. It's great for rapid delivery, high scalability and low maintenance from day one.

Cloud Guru, a local Melbourne startup, is built entirely on AWS Lambda. They host Serverless/Lambda community meetups as well, and write about the tech at https://read.acloud.guru/tagged/serverless

I am considering very much the same question — in fact, I got here via an HN search for 'AWS Lambda'. I am currently using Heroku + Heroku Postgres, but increasingly feeling overcharged and not entirely impressed.

At the moment I'm weighing up Amazon RDS Postgres plus either Lambda/API Gateway or Elastic Beanstalk.

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