Honestly, why chime in with that? Not only is it sort of sneering (if you're that small), it's wrong and counter to the most practical advice we give out here, use what you know. It's hard enough starting a business without learning a whole new tech stack.
Ironically, we were having the discussion here yesterday about a guy with a failed startup saying he'd wasted the opportunity because he used too much new stuff and spent all his time on that instead of iterating the actual product. Several comments focused on it'd just be better to start off with a Rails app, it's quick, it's easy and it's understood.
And really, is lambda appropriate for anything more than a very focused niche app? I mean, try writing all the usual things you need to slot into a SaaS on it, billing, user management, signup, admin reports, admin functionality, emails, multi-tenancy, custom domains, etc. etc. Even a 20 user, internal, enterprise app needs most of that functionality. Put on top of that, you're forced to use a particular, proprietary tech stack and lock yourself into something that might very well die in a couple of years.
It takes a lot to have any meaningful lambda bill. That in no way is meant to be an insult. If you’re spending even $100/month on lambda, you’re running a successful website.
It's hard enough starting a business without learning a whole new tech stack.
If you know how to write a program and create a function that takes two parameters - a payload and context argument - you know lambda. You can write it in the console if you’re using Python or Node and just run it from there.
Even if you don’t want to learn that, you can host your standard C#/WebAPI, Python/Django/Flask, Node/Express API on lambda just by adding code and changing your endpoint.
Several comments focused on it'd just be better to start off with a Rails app, it's quick, it's easy and it's understood.
There is also code to wrap a Rails app and run it on lambda....
And really, is lambda appropriate for anything more than a very focused niche app? I mean, try writing all the usual things you need to slot into a SaaS on it, billing, user management, signup, admin reports, admin functionality, emails, multi-tenancy, custom domains, etc. etc. Even a 20 user, internal, enterprise app needs most of that functionality
Yes. Especially in today’s world of client side frameworks and microservices, you host your static assets like Javascript, css, and HTML in S3 and call server side APIs hosted on lambda.
Put on top of that, you're forced to use a particular, proprietary tech stack and lock yourself into something that might very well die in a couple of years.
Well, two things. What’s more likely to die in two years / your startup or AWS?
Second, you can host your standard API just by adding four lines of code and you don’t have to make any changes to host it in Docker or on a VM.
There is a way to do this in every language that lambda natively supports. For instance for Node:
I have a Node/Express app that gets deployed to both lambda and Fargate (Serverless Docker) when I push it. The only difference is that lambda uses one entry point and Docker uses another.
Where it is deployed to both lambda and a Windows server running IIS.
I can be a lot more productive with all the resources that AWS has to offer when all I have to do is provision resources with a CloudFormation template and instead of doing the grunt work of infrastructure administration I can concentrate on writing software.
Ironically, we were having the discussion here yesterday about a guy with a failed startup saying he'd wasted the opportunity because he used too much new stuff and spent all his time on that instead of iterating the actual product. Several comments focused on it'd just be better to start off with a Rails app, it's quick, it's easy and it's understood.
And really, is lambda appropriate for anything more than a very focused niche app? I mean, try writing all the usual things you need to slot into a SaaS on it, billing, user management, signup, admin reports, admin functionality, emails, multi-tenancy, custom domains, etc. etc. Even a 20 user, internal, enterprise app needs most of that functionality. Put on top of that, you're forced to use a particular, proprietary tech stack and lock yourself into something that might very well die in a couple of years.