[davidvanleeuwen]

After multiple side projects with Lambda (e.g. image processing services), we finally implemented it on larger scale. Initially we started out without any framework or tool to help, because there we pretty much non-existent at that time. We created our own tool, and used Swagger a lot for working with API gateway (because it is really bad to work with). Over time everything smoothened out and really worked nicely (except for API Gateway though). Nowadays we have everything in Terraform and Serverless templates, which really makes your life easier if you're going to build your complete infrastructure on top of AWS Lambda and other AWS APIs. There are still a bunch of quarks you have to work with, but at the end of the line: it works and you don't have to worry much about scaling.

I'm not allowed to give you any numbers; here's an old blogpost about Sketch Cloud: https://awkward.co/blog/building-sketch-cloud-without-server... (however, this isn't accurate anymore). For this use-case, concurrent executions for image uploads is a big deal (a regular Sketch document can easily exist out of 100 images). But basically the complete API runs on Lambda.

Running other languages on Lambda can be easily done and can be pretty fast, because you simply use node to spawn a process (Serverless has lots of examples of that).

Let me know if you have any specific questions :-)

Hope this helps.

[3minus1]

why is API gateway so bad?

[davidvanleeuwen]

Well, using it manually is just cumbersome. API Gateway is not specifically designed for Lambda, so it has lots of settings which you would think are just default for building your API. Using it through Cloudformation or Serverless is way easier.