Serverless Launchpad

Need to set up cloud environments & delivery pipelines for your new project but not sure where to start?

Developing and deploying any workload on AWS—serverless or otherwise—can be error prone, time consuming and risk laden. You need to think about:

• How can each developer have their own individual cloud development environment and access real cloud services without interfering with others?
• How do you automate deployments to staging and production environments, ensuring they are fast and repeatable?
• How do you design a future-proof codebase structure, capable of expanding with fast-growing feature set?
• What tests do you need to run to ensure the quality of your codebase and to maximise speed of feedback?
• Are you following AWS’s recommended best security practices?
• Where do you find the documentation to help you make all of these decisions?

You chose serverless to avoid undifferentiated heavy-lifting, but now you’ve all these problems to solve before you can start building.

Ship new features to production on day 1

Imagine a future for your new product where:

• New developers get productive quickly through easy-to-understand documentation.
• Quality checks run at every point in the developer workflow to identify issues as early as possible.
• You can confidently and continuously deploy changes right through to production multiple times per day.
• Developers can add new services into the architecture with their own pipeline.
• Your team grows to become self-sufficient in the AWS cloud environment while having an expert on-hand for advice on issues they cannot resolve themselves.

The Serverless Launchpad service gives you all this and more

By hiring me to build the launchpad for your new serverless project, you free up your team to focus on building features for your new product and directly delivering value to your users.

Here’s what you get

The solution is split into four areas:

1. AWS Landing Zone — A multi-account AWS account setup using AWS Organizations (configured as IaC with OrgFormation). Each account comes with CloudTrail auditing, billing alerts and least-privilege IAM roles for use with continuous deployment and testing all pre-installed. SSO is enabled to allow team members to easily connect to each account.
2. Architecture Scaffold — An extensible code repo containing a fully functional REST API service using API Gateway, Lambda, Cognito and DynamoDB. The scaffold also supports addition of other services and easily allows for code sharing between them. Serverless Framework is used to to manage and deploy resource configuration.
3. Dev Environments — Each developer can deploy their own instance of the product as isolated stacks to the dev account. Multiple test types and quality tools come built in. The dev environment is optimised for Node.js and is TypeScript enabled.
4. Delivery Automation — CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions which run checks on Pull Requests and deploy services to target cloud environments on merge to main branch.

Unlike other cloud landing zone setup services, everything that I set up for you—including all the AWS Organization-level and CI/CD pipeline configuration—uses Infrastructure-as-Code. These IaC templates (and the scripts which invoke them) will all be included in your GitHub repo. This makes it much easier for your team to see what customisations have been made to your AWS environment and for you to apply further changes to these.

In addition to the above items which are delivered as part of the Launchpad service, I also offer multiple guidance options for an extended period post-delivery where I can field questions and help your developers with any issues they may have.

How it works

1. After you apply, we’ll schedule a call where I’ll ask you a few questions about your team and your project.
2. I’ll send you through a checklist of things I need from you before I can get started. This will typically involve you creating a new GitHub repository and a new AWS account (which will act as the management account for your organization) and granting me access to both (via an IAM user for the AWS account).
3. I’ll then get to work on configuring the AWS environments, pushing and deploying the code, setting up pipelines, running several checks and producing documentation.
4. I’ll notify you once everything’s ready, and your team can then start immediately adding features right through to production by following the instructions in the provided documentation.
5. We’ll schedule a handover call a few days afterwards once your team has had a chance to familiarise yourself with the codebase and docs and to test out the pipeline. We can also discuss any ongoing support you may need at this time.

The price of the service is £7,000 GBP (≈$8,540 USD).

Learn from a seasoned serverless architect

I’m Paul Swail, an independent cloud architect who helps development teams make the transition to serverless. Over the past 4 years, I’ve helped clients build and launch scores of greenfield serverless projects on AWS.

During this time, I’ve accumulated a ton of useful practices, templates, code snippets, plugins, architectural patterns, sensible defaults and optimised workflows. I’ve used these to help development teams with zero or limited cloud expertise move fast with quality checks built in right through the development and release cycle. I’ve found out the hard way what works well and what doesn’t.

I’ve now integrated these learnings into this streamlined Serverless Launchpad service.

Still have questions?

Availability is limited

I can only take on 1–2 Serverless Launchpad engagements per month and I may need a few weeks’ lead time before getting started. So if you’re hoping to begin development soon, apply now to reserve your spot.