What are you building?
Pick the job. Each page gives the tools I'd use for it, in order of preference, what I'd avoid and what to use instead, and the worked example behind it.
- 01 An API for my app I need a backend API that reads and writes a database. My picks: Lambda function URLs, Neon (serverless Postgres), Lambda Web Functions, Cloudflare Workers
- 02 An AI chat or LLM feature My app needs to call an LLM and stream the answer to users. My picks: Cloudflare Workers, OpenRouter, pgvector, Cloudflare AI Gateway
- 03 Something live that many people watch at once Live auctions, collaborative editing, polls, chat rooms, game lobbies. My picks: Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare Durable Objects, Neon (serverless Postgres), Amazon S3
- 04 A traffic spike I can see coming A flash sale, ticket drop or launch where thousands hit at once. My picks: Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare Durable Objects, AWS Lambda, Stripe
- 05 A website, SPA or PWA A marketing site or a front-end app. My picks: Cloudflare static hosting, Cloudflare R2, Astro on Cloudflare Workers, Next.js on Cloudflare Workers (OpenNext), Cloudflare Turnstile
- 06 Background jobs and retries Work that runs after the request, with retries. My picks: Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, Lambda durable functions
- 07 Event-driven plumbing Moving events between services, buffering work, fanning out and streaming records into the lake. My picks: Amazon EventBridge, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon Data Firehose, Amazon Kinesis
- 08 A job that runs for hours A nightly import, report or migration longer than 15 minutes. My picks: Fargate scheduled tasks, Amazon EventBridge
- 09 Device and IoT data Thousands of devices sending readings that end up in reports. My picks: AWS IoT Core, Amazon SQS, Neon (serverless Postgres)
- 10 Semantic search and RAG Search by meaning, or feed an LLM your documents. My picks: pgvector, Amazon S3 Vectors
- 11 Sending email Transactional emails and newsletters. My picks: Resend, Amazon SES
- 12 A database Where the data lives. My picks: Neon (serverless Postgres), Aurora PostgreSQL
- 13 A data lake Analytics over everything the apps produce, cheaply, without a warehouse to run. My picks: Amazon S3, Amazon Data Firehose, S3 + Glue + Athena, DuckDB, Aurora PostgreSQL
- 14 Provisioning everything Infrastructure as code across AWS and every vendor. My picks: Pulumi
- 15 Private access and exposing a box Reach private AWS resources, or publish a service from a server. My picks: Tailscale, Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared)
- 16 Logs without a shocking bill Observability that doesn't cost more than the app. My picks: Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Data Firehose, DuckDB, Cloudflare Workers
- 17 An AWS foundation for a client Accounts, access, backups and cost from day one. My picks: AWS Organizations + IAM Identity Center, Pulumi, AWS Backup, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, Cost Explorer (with Claude Code)
- 18 Moving on-premises systems to AWS Lift databases and apps into AWS. My picks: Claude Code, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Organizations + IAM Identity Center, Pulumi
- 19 Building with AI agents How I write and test code now. My picks: Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Playwright, Vitest, pytest, Stryker mutation testing, GitHub, Self-hosted MCP servers
- 20 Sign-in and identity How users sign in, reset passwords and use Google, Microsoft or their company login. My picks: Better Auth, Amazon Cognito, Resend, Cloudflare Workers
- 21 Running the business Payments, analytics and the daily tools. My picks: Stripe, PostHog, GitHub
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.