Serverless Architecture for Startup
This article and the solution we proposed here are inspired by Eric Ries in his classic book, Lean Startup, especially on the two points below:
- Everyone, anywhere can be entrepreneur regardless of their background, technical or non-technical
- Startups are inherently untested, being new products and ideas they need continual state of learning, called “validated learning”. This is where we establish a process called “Build Measure Learn”, and if you are just starting, you need an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
There are base modules or functionalities that usually are needed regardless of your ideas:
- Authentication for you web and mobile app (Identity Provider)
- User and Access Controls Management (Identity Management)
- Admin Panel or CRUD for your data model
- Analytics or reporting
- Multi-tenancy (where you have multiple customers using the same services, without extra efforts to provision the infra)
In order to build MVP fast, you need to focus on building your value proposition, your secret sauce, and not worrying too much about bugs or delay in delivering the base modules. But even that is usually not the case. There are millions of developers out there who claim can build that for you, but with varying degree of quality, of course. Rather than risking your valuable time in dealing with another uncertainties, why don’t you adopt a framework that allows you to build MVP fast, scalable, at the lowest cost possible at the same time. And reusable for the actual product, so nothing wasted and thrown away. That can only be achieved with Serverless architecture. Psst, If you are non-technical person, we are offering super flexible payment term for our solution: https://saaslayer.io/ , even with equity pay:) . Thanks to the SaasLayer framework that allows us to deliver stuff effortlessly.
The fundamental principles of Serverless architecture are
- There is no single server to maintain, this includes databases and all other runtime for your code
- No server to maintain meaning you don’t have to worry about security patches, or software upgrade. This is big especially if you are still on old school Windows stack
- It can scale from 0 to millions of concurrent users without doing anything
- It elastic and based on pay per use (so theoretically you pay zero dollar if no one is using your service)
Because there is no server to maintain, there is no inherent cost in hosting fee, and efforts to maintain the server with all the security patches, etc.
Now time for technical. What we use at SaaSLayer basically a bunch of open source that we experiments and bundle them together on AWS.
Open Source we’re using includes:
- Node OIDC for Identity Provider
- Laravel for Identity Management and Admin Panel
- Express Prisma for REST or GraphQL API
- Serverless for deployment on AWS Lambda
- Bref for PHP deployment on AWS Lambda
The beauty of this, not a single server we provisioned for this solution, not even the database. We are using Aurora Postgres Serverless that we configure with min instances set to 0, so if there is no traffic, so it won‘t incur any cost.
Before I end the article, let’s go back to our initial question about MVP and the speed of development. How long does it take build an MVP typically? Well I would say, it will take a few days to a week to have everything developed and deployed in AWS environment. Provided you already have all the data models and relationship. Feel free to reach out to us for more info at hello@cloudstory.dev
