“The Stack”: Everything you’ll need

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This will be a series of blog posts where we will build up the perfect infrastructure setup for the majority of usecase, aka “The Stack”. We’ll be building everything on top of AWS.

Before diving in, let’s first establish some goals:

• Performant: Latency and performance is important as this will serve end-users.
• Low cost: We want our base cost to be low, and our costs to scale well with high traffic. Ideally, it should cost nothing if no users are using it.
• Low operational overhead: It’s >=2023, nobody wants to nurse servers or services anymore, things should scale up and down without intervention or oversight.
• High flexibility: Everything should be built with the foresight of future scalability, both organizationally, code-wise, and in the way things fit together.
• Modular: Pieces of the infrastructure should be opt-out, e.g. if you don’t need Pub/Sub, it can be skipped.

Obviously, this is my personal opinion on it, but I’ll be sharing the thinking behind each of the choices as we go along.

Some technology choices upfront:

• Everything will be infrastructure as code using AWS CDK.
• We’ll be using Rust throughout for each service, as it allows us to squeeze out the most performance while still giving us a nice developer experience.