Serverless architecture

Serverless is excellent for spiky, event-driven and low-volume workloads, and a poor fit for others. We are direct about which one you have.

Where it wins

Anything with unpredictable or bursty demand. A workload that runs a few thousand times a day costs close to nothing on Lambda and requires a permanently provisioned instance otherwise. Scheduled jobs, webhook handlers, image and file processing, and glue between systems are all natural fits.

Event-driven architecture with EventBridge decouples services properly - producers emit events without knowing who consumes them, which makes adding a consumer a deployment rather than a refactor. Step Functions handles multi-step workflows with retries, error branches and state you would otherwise hand-roll badly.

Where it does not

Sustained high-throughput workloads are usually cheaper on containers. Anything needing sub-50ms consistent latency will fight cold starts. Long-running processes hit execution limits. And a team with no distributed-systems experience will find debugging across twenty functions harder than one application.

We will tell you when a container is the better answer. Recommending serverless for everything is a good way to build something expensive and hard to reason about.

Getting the details right

The problems that bite in production are rarely the architecture. They are concurrency limits throttling under load, a downstream database exhausting connections because a hundred function instances opened one each, retry storms amplifying a partial failure, and DynamoDB access patterns designed like a relational schema.

We design for those up front - provisioned concurrency where latency matters, connection pooling through RDS Proxy, idempotency so retries are safe, and single-table DynamoDB modelling driven by your actual queries.

Observability gets particular attention, because a request crossing eight functions is genuinely hard to debug without distributed tracing in place from the start.