Learn AWS Lambda’s shortfalls and why one team moved some services from Lambda to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

After many months of development, my team just announced the general availability of our platform. That milestone seems like a perfect opportunity to look back and reflect on how the infrastructure that supports Prismatic has evolved over time. (Spoiler: We ended up moving our most important microservice from Lambda to ECS.)

In this post I’ll dive into what went well in Lambda, what challenges we faced, and why we eventually made the decision to migrate some services from Lambda to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS).

What Problem Are We Solving?

For some quick context, our product is an integration platform for B2B software companies. That is, we help software companies build integrations and deploy those integrations to their customers. A simple integration might look something like this:

• Step 1: Pull down an XML document from Dropbox.
• Step 2: Process the XML with some custom JavaScript code.
• Step 3: Use some stored credentials to post the processed data to a third-party API.

Our users can configure integrations to run on a schedule, or they can trigger them via a webhook, and our platform takes care of running, logging, and monitoring the integrations (and a whole bunch of other things).

#cloud #devops #aws #lambda #ecs