I've tried to use Zappa for a non-trivial personal project to run a Django app and I found:
- Super nice, low config API
- easy to deploy
- great out-of-the-box support for async tasks (no Celery! woo!)
but:
- It was a nightmare getting certain Python libraries (eg. Pillow, psycopg) to work in the AWS Lambda environment
- It really sucked having to deploy to AWS in order to debug issues which cannot be reproduced locally (eg. library)
- It seems hard to get away from using AWS tools to observe your code in prod (eg. CloudWatch for logs)
- I still needed a database to maintain state, DynamoDB didn't work with Django's ORM and was surprisingly expensive, and if I'm going to shell out $10/mo for a Postgres RDS instance then I may as well run the whole thing on EC2 anyway
I think Zappa is a really nice tool for some niche use cases, and I'd definitely turn to it if I needed to stand up some small, stateless serverless service, but I would hate to support and debug it as a web app in prod.
- Super nice, low config API
- easy to deploy
- great out-of-the-box support for async tasks (no Celery! woo!)
but:
- It was a nightmare getting certain Python libraries (eg. Pillow, psycopg) to work in the AWS Lambda environment
- It really sucked having to deploy to AWS in order to debug issues which cannot be reproduced locally (eg. library)
- It seems hard to get away from using AWS tools to observe your code in prod (eg. CloudWatch for logs)
- I still needed a database to maintain state, DynamoDB didn't work with Django's ORM and was surprisingly expensive, and if I'm going to shell out $10/mo for a Postgres RDS instance then I may as well run the whole thing on EC2 anyway
I think Zappa is a really nice tool for some niche use cases, and I'd definitely turn to it if I needed to stand up some small, stateless serverless service, but I would hate to support and debug it as a web app in prod.
project: https://memories.ninja
zappa version: https://github.com/MattSegal/family-photos/tree/lambda-hosti...
ec2 version: https://github.com/MattSegal/family-photos