Case studies of AWS serverless apps in production

Are you considering building a new serverless app on AWS? Or maybe migrating an existing workload to a serverless architecture?

Then you probably have a lot of exploratory research ahead of you. Reading tutorials and technical docs on how Lambda and other services work is important and you might even decide to put together a proof of concept app to understand what it’s like to develop on.

But to really get a feel for what it will be like running your app in production, you need to get the warts-and-all lowdown from people who’ve already navigated this path rather than naively jumping in head-first.

Yes Amazon themselves provide a “Customer Success” website dedicated to case studies but this is effectively just a marketing exercise with no real insight into the more technical challenges that the customer encountered. Nice fluff for business execs but pretty useless to engineers.

To help with this, I’ve curated the following list of articles from across the web written by organisations who built their production workloads with real users on a serverless AWS architecture. The articles describe the problems they hit along the way, the solutions they arrived at and an overall summary of the impact on their organisation.

The Case Studies

I’ve ranked each article using a Pain Index 🤕 — a score out of 5 based on how much the author goes into detail on the pains they encountered using serverless techs and tools.

• How Ipdata Serves 25M API Calls From 10 Infinitely Scalable Global Endpoints For $150 A Month

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕
  Use case: IP Geolocation API Provider.
  Techs: Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB.

• Our (not so smooth) journey productising a serverless app on AWS

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Cloud diagramming app.
  Techs: Lambda, API Gateway, Serverless Framework, Secrets Manager, and VPC.

• How I built a serverless web crawler to mine Vancouver real estate data at scale

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Website scraper.
  Techs: Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS, and CloudWatch.

• Lessons Learned  —  A Year Of Going “Fully Serverless” In Production

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕
  Use case: SaaS Product Management Portal.
  Techs: Lambda, API Gateway, Netlify CDN, Apex, Parameter Store, and Node.js.

• Building a serverless, on-demand data science solution

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Revenue forecasting web application.
  Techs: Lambda, API Gateway, S3, RDS, Python, Flask, and Zappa.

• Going Serverless: From Common LISP and CGI to AWS Lambda and API Gateway

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Migrating legacy interactive web-based programming tutorial.
  Techs: Lambda, Python, API Gateway, Serverless Framework, and IAM.

• How I scaled my static website to a global market for a fraction of the cost on AWS

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Migration from EC2-backed to static hosted website.
  Techs: CloudFront, S3, Route53, and TravisCI.

• Accelerating cross platform development with serverless microservices

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Cross-platform mobile app for social media management
  Techs: Lambda, Java, Jenkins, Android, iOS, Terraform, CloudWatch, and SNS.

• Serverless Monitoring and Notification Pipeline

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Audit and notification system for Fortune 500 company.
  Techs: Lambda, DynamoDB, IAM, Service Catalog, RDS, CodePipeline, CloudFormation, and Python.

• A Case Study for Serverless Integration: Customizing OpsGenie’s Zendesk Integration with AWS Lambda

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Integration between helpdesk and incident management products.
  Techs: Lambda, Serverless Framework, and Python.

• How Locize leverages serverless

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Translation Management System.
  Techs: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, SES, Node.js, and Claudia.js.

• Making MOT a live service

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕
  Use case: UK Government Vehicle Testing (MOT) Service.
  Techs: Lambda and Java.
  Notes Code for service is open-sourced.

• Running an entire company on Serverless — CloudSpoilt

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Application security monitoring.
  Techs: Lambda, API Gateway, RDS, S3, and CloudFront.

• Serverless  —  the future of software architecture?

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Online learning platform.
  Techs: Lambda, Node.js, API Gateway, Auth0, S3, Firebase, and Stripe.

• Serverless Case Study - Coca-Cola

  Pain Index: 🤕 🤕
  Use case: Migration of vending machine management system from EC2 to Serverless.
  Techs: Lambda and API Gateway.

Have your own serverless story? I will be evolving this list regularly, so if you’ve built a production serverless app on AWS and wrote about it somewhere, just drop me a message with a link to your article and I’ll happily add it.