6 posts tagged with "aws"

Next.js enables developers to build full stack applications with the Server Side Rendering capability. Vercel and Netlify help them to write the backend API with serverless functions. So the next question is what is the ideal database for Next.js apps. In this post, I will review the databases which are popular among the Next.js community. I will comment on how they fit the serverless model. Two things to check:

• Serverless pricing: Is the price pay-per-use? When the database is not in use, do you still have to pay?
• Serverless connections: Is there support for HTTP based connections? So there should not be any connection problems which are common with serverless functions.

In this article, we will analyse three managed Kafka products to check if they are really serverless.

1- AWS MSK

2- Confluent Cloud

3- Upstash

Serverless is great for developers who want to build an application end to end with lowest maintenance and financial cost. Serverless functions enable you to run your own code without maintaining the backend infra. But they are stateless by design so you need an external data store. So the next question is which databases are best fit for serverless? The good news is database vendors see the serverless trend and they are either launching either serverless offerings or trying to adapt their product. In this article, I will first list the things that make a database great for serverless. Then I will list the database that I personally think to be candidates to be the great database for Serverless.

• This is a continuation of the blog post published in April,2021.

We built a sample application which compares the performance of leading serverless databases using a common web use case and serverless functions. The databases are DynamoDB, MongoDB (Atlas), Firestore, Cassandra (Datastax Astra), FaunaDB and Redis (Upstash)

1 ms latency is easy with Redis when the database and clients are in the same region. But if you want the clients to be globally distributed then the latency rises over 100 ms. We built Edge Caching to overcome this.

AWS Lambda pioneered serverless space. Many developers think that serverless is the future of development. It gives you the true pay-per-use model, relieves you from the maintenance and scaling of the backend infrastructure. But it also comes with challenges. One of those is its statelessness. You need to keep the state in an external data store. Unfortunately most of the popular data stores are connection based. But as we explained in this post, managing connections can become painful in serverless. That’s why, we have developed a high performance REST API on top of Upstash Redis. In this blog post, I will implement a very basic stateful api (page counter) on AWS Lambda and Upstash Redis using the REST API.