Thread by @matthewdfuller

I know "serverless" is sometimes called out as a buzzword, but the model #AWS #Lambda introduced quite literally changed my career (and consequently, my life). (Thread)

https://twitter.com/ajaynairthinks/status/1327372121568264192

A few years ago, I started an open source security auditing tool called CloudSploit. It got a lot of users, but many were asking me if I could offer a hosted version as an API (and they were willing to pay for it!).

I had some experience with server side dev, but CloudSploit had unique challenges. It would have to horizontally scale out / back very quickly as it was running these security scans. I built a quick set of services using EC2, but it quickly became expensive and hard to manage.

Since it was just a side project at the time, I decided to try out AWS Lambda to run everything. I made a choice to run the entire thing not using a single server. I even wrote a blog post about it at the time: blog.cloudsploit.com/we-made-the-wh…

Throughout the entire time that I operated CloudSploit on Lambda, we never spent more than $100 a month on infrastructure costs. And we were running a massive number of scans per day after several months. That would easily have been 10x in a traditional environment.

I was also not woken up a single time by disk space alerts and we never experienced a single outage in 4 years that was the result of the infrastructure. It let me and our very small team actually focus on building an amazing product.

Last year, CloudSploit was acquired by Aqua Security, but we're still serverless (and joined a team of serverless fans themselves!). I am still amazed how such a seemingly-minor technology choice has led to this series of events.

It's probably minor in terms of what the @awscloud Lambda team has seen, but I can't thank them enough for creating the technology that put all of this into motion.