Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I've built a couple of complete SAAS applications on an AWS stack pretty similar to this and I can say that I've been incredibly productive.

The one technology I particularly like is Cognito/UserPools for user management - I never want to write Yet Another User Management System again.

I'd never use DynamoDB though - it's never made sense to me.

* AWS Userpools

* AWS Cognito

* AWS S3 Simple Storage Service

* AWS EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud

* AWS SQS Simple Queue Service

* AWS CloudFront

* AWS CloudWatch

* AWS KMS Key Management Service

* AWS Certificate Management Service

* AWS Route53

* AWS Lambda

* Postgres/SQL

* Python 3.6

* ReactJS/ES2015

One big reason to use DynamoDB with Lambda is to avoid the VPC penalty (~10-20 second cold starts to attach ENI) in Lambda necessary to use RDS securely. DynamoDB can be used without security groups and still use IAM-based access to lock it down securely. With RDS, you need to use security groups to properly secure your DB, which requires VPC for Lambda.

DynamoDB has world-class horizontal scalability but certainly comes with a high architecture integration cost, depending on your use cases.

Have you tried adding this to the first line of your handler function definition?

   context.callbackWaitsForEmptyEventLoop = false;

I only came across this last night, so haven't had a chance to test yet. Supposedly reduces the cold-start VPC delay significantly.

PostgreSQL on RDS?

No, on EC2. I prefer direct control over the database and see no reason to pay more for an RDS instance.

Is there a YAUMS beta coming soon?

What is YAUMS?

> ...Yet Another User Management System...

OH sorry. That's what AWS Cognito with AWS Userpools is - a user management system. When I say that I never want to write YAUMS again, I mean that Cognito and USerpools frees me from ever having to do that task again.

Sorry. Bad joke :/

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