From "Hello Lambda" to Building Production Systems

Serverless is supposed to make things simpler - just write your code and let the cloud handle the rest. At Jodo, we bought into that promise, using Lambda, EventBridge, and API Gateway to build everything from webhook handlers to audit log processors. And in many ways, it did make us faster. But as our systems grew, we found ourselves facing all the engineering puzzles that come with building reliable, secure, and high-performing applications. In this talk, I’ll share our journey from “Hello, Lambda!” to build production systems that scale - and the challenges we had to tackle along the way.

We’ll talk about:

• The realities of cold starts and concurrency limits - and how provisioned concurrency helped (sometimes!).
• Making sense of logs and traces in a world without servers - and how we made debugging a little less painful.
• Keeping our systems secure, from IAM permissions to secret management, without losing sleep.

This is a story of what worked, what didn’t, and what we’d do differently if we started over. If you’re working with serverless - or thinking about it - come learn from our experiences and take away practical ideas you can apply to your own systems.