Aws

While most AWS cost optimization guides focus on Reserved Instances and Spot Instances, there are several underutilized services that can provide significant savings. Here’s a detailed look at services that often get overlooked, with actual pricing comparisons. DynamoDB Provisioned vs On-Demand: 85% Cost Reduction DynamoDB on-demand is convenient but costs 6-7x more than provisioned capacity for predictable workloads. This difference can mean thousands of dollars per month for active applications. ...

Your PostgreSQL queries were fast in development. Now in production on RDS, they crawl. Here’s how to find what’s really slowing them down and choose the right instance type. I’ve debugged hundreds of slow PostgreSQL queries on RDS. The problem is rarely what you think it is, and throwing a bigger instance at it usually doesn’t help. Let me show you how to find the real bottlenecks and pick the right instance for your workload. ...

Ever needed to automatically generate screenshots of web pages? Maybe for social media previews, monitoring, or just because manually screenshotting 50 URLs sounds like torture. I built this exact API for a client who needed to generate previews of user-submitted websites. Here’s how to build your own serverless screenshot service that can handle thousands of requests without breaking the bank. Why Lambda + Puppeteer? Before we dive in, let’s talk about why this architecture makes sense: ...

Building a Poor Man’s Vercel: Deploy Any Framework to AWS in Under $5/month Last week, Vercel quoted me $20/month for a simple portfolio site that gets 1000 visits per day. GitHub Pages couldn’t handle my Next.js API routes. Netlify’s build minutes vanished in 3 days. So I built my own Vercel clone on AWS. It handles Next.js (with ISR), Nuxt, SvelteKit, and even Remix. Total cost? $3.50/month. Here’s exactly how to build a production-ready deployment platform that rivals Vercel’s features without the price tag. ...

AWS Lambda VPC Configuration: The Complete Guide to Private Networking and Cost Optimization with NAT Instances Three months ago, I got a $400 AWS bill that made me question everything I knew about serverless architecture. The culprit? NAT Gateways supporting Lambda functions that barely handled 10,000 requests per month. That’s when I learned the hard way that “serverless” doesn’t mean “cheap” when you need proper networking. After weeks of deep-diving into VPC configurations, NAT alternatives, and cost optimization, I cut our Lambda networking costs by 85% while maintaining security and performance. Here’s everything I learned about running Lambda functions in VPCs the cost-effective way. ...

Zero to Production: Deploy a Full-Stack App with SST and AWS in 60 Minutes In 2025, deploying production-ready applications shouldn’t require weeks of DevOps work. Today, I’ll show you how to build and deploy a full-stack serverless application in just 60 minutes using SST (Serverless Stack) v3, the framework that’s revolutionizing how we build on AWS. What We’re Building We’ll create a real-time collaborative todo application with: Backend: Serverless API with Lambda and API Gateway Database: DynamoDB for scalable data storage Authentication: AWS Cognito for secure user management Frontend: React app with real-time updates Hosting: S3 and CloudFront for global distribution The best part? Everything is type-safe, from infrastructure to API calls. ...