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Building Serverless Applications That Scale The Perfect Amount

Allen Helton
Better Programming
Published in
9 min readJun 22, 2022

Image by Kevin Schneider from Pixabay

One of the benefits you’ll hear when people pitch you on serverless is that “it handles scaling for you and you never have to worry about it.”

Man, I wish that was true.

It’s not.

What is true, is that your cloud vendor does handle the scaling events for you. Pretty well, too. It’s handled without any interaction from you and it scales to virtually any level ( assuming you have increased service quotas).

What is not true is the fact that you don’t have to worry about it. You absolutely have to worry about scale when designing serverless applications.

When designing your application, you need to know roughly the degree at which requests will be coming in. Is it 1 request per second? 10? 1,000? 100,000?

For each order of magnitude, you scale you need to consider how you’ll handle the increased load across the system. The scale doesn’t just refer to how your API Gateway handles traffic. It’s how your database, back-end processes, and…

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Allen Helton
Allen Helton

Written by Allen Helton

I am an AWS serverless hero with a strong focus on API design and standardization, event-driven architectures, and software automation.

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Interesting read, thanks for your article

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Really really good. Super insightful. Thanks for the write.

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