[chris_armstrong]

My company started from nothing on serverless about 18 months ago with a small team and now ramping up to several developers. Unlike the author, we're using more run-of-the-mill tooling (like AWS SAM) and more unit testing than integration testing, but the set up is otherwise very similar (TypeScript frontend and backend, a fully deployed version of the application per branch).

Our application has evolved from a simple API Gateway + frontend architecture to numerous asynchronous processes, dozens of integrated Lambdas, numerous S3 buckets and DynamoDB tables, third-party system integrations, cross-account integrations, etc.

It's been great for our velocity, costs next to nothing to run in development, and has been generally straightforward to refactor any "monolithic" parts into smaller, reusable, event-driven units. We operate in a very traditional industry and interface with much older style enterprise systems.

I wouldn't say any part of it is truly "magical", but the ability to give each developer their own fresh copy of the environment for each new piece of work at little to no cost is incredible. It's wonderful not having to concern ourselves with scaling each of our resources or worrying that they'll go down, as well as not needing the regular maintenance that comes with servers or containers.

[tempnow987]

Might be worth doing a write-up of a less "magical" approach. I've always found the magical setups a time suck (maybe with exception of ruby on rails and a few others).