The layers of a system.
Every part of what you build, from the edge to the tools that run the business. Each layer lists the tools I use, the ones I'm watching and the ones I'd avoid.
- 01 Edge Between your users and your backend. 5 tools: Astro on Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare Durable Objects, Cloudflare Turnstile, Cloudflare Workers, Next.js on Cloudflare Workers (OpenNext)
- 02 Compute Where business logic runs. 4 tools: Fargate scheduled tasks, Lambda container images, Lambda Web Functions, AWS Lambda
- 03 APIs, queues and events How requests and events move. 12 tools: API Gateway, GraphQL and AppSync, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Data Firehose, AWS IoT Core, Amazon Kinesis, Lambda durable functions, Lambda function URLs, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, AWS Step Functions, Cloudflare Queues
- 04 Data Databases, migrations and the data lake. 9 tools: S3 + Glue + Athena, Aurora PostgreSQL, AWS Database Migration Service, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon OpenSearch, Cloudflare D1, Cloudflare Hyperdrive, DuckDB, Neon (serverless Postgres)
- 05 AI Models, embeddings and agent access. 8 tools: Anthropic API (for client systems), Amazon S3 Vectors, Cloudflare AI Gateway, Cloudflare Sandbox, Cloudflare Workers AI, Self-hosted MCP servers, OpenRouter, pgvector
- 06 Email Transactional and marketing. 4 tools: Amazon Pinpoint, Amazon SES, Postmark, Resend
- 07 Storage and delivery Files, websites and CDNs. 4 tools: Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2, Cloudflare static hosting
- 08 Observability Logs, metrics, alarms. 1 tools: Amazon CloudWatch
- 09 Infrastructure as code If I can't provision it, it loses points. 4 tools: AWS CloudFormation, GitHub Actions, Pulumi, Terraform / OpenTofu
- 10 Networking and hosting Private access, exposure, DNS, servers. 4 tools: Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared), Route 53 and Cloudflare DNS, Hostinger VPS, Tailscale
- 11 Accounts, identity and cost The AWS foundation. 6 tools: AWS Backup, Amazon Cognito, Cost Explorer (with Claude Code), AWS Organizations + IAM Identity Center, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, Better Auth
- 12 Build and test How the code gets written and checked. 8 tools: Claude Code, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Atlassian, Node.js (plain JavaScript), OpenAI Codex, Stryker mutation testing, Playwright, Vitest, pytest, TypeScript
- 13 Business tools Payments, analytics, the daily kit. 6 tools: Dashlane, PostHog, Jira, Asana, Monday.com and heavy project-management software, Slack, Stripe, Trello
- 14 Platforms The clouds I don't pick. 4 tools: Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Windows and the Microsoft stack, Netlify, Vercel
Want this stack in your AWS account?
Cloudless Labs is a Sydney consultancy. We migrate on-premises systems to AWS, build serverless apps on this stack, and coach teams to ship with Claude Code and Codex.