Scaling: Amplify vs Elastic Beanstalk/CloudFormation

Question

I am learning about Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation after having a little bit of experience with Amplify.

I have an Amplify website using Next.js, my use case doesn't require data storage yet and i've been able to handle any 'backendish' related needs using lambda+api gateway+s3.

I know I dont have any EC2 instances and ASGs set up when running my Amplify site and that makes me doubt that it can handle the same load that true infrastructure or infrastructure as software can.

I have never been able to get a good yes or no answer regarding if Amplify can handle huge traffic spikes. I've read and heard from support that you can increase your service limit quota for lambda to help in this area but that seems very static and arbitrary - not at all a dynamic system like ASGs.

It feels like ESB/CloudFormation would probably better suited to handle spikey traffic? Can someone with more experience let me know if this is true?

Thank you!

Accepted Answer

Lambda can scale to handle traffic spikes much faster than EC2 autoscaling.

The first time you invoke your function, AWS Lambda creates an instance of the function and runs its handler method to process the event. When the function returns a response, it stays active and waits to process additional events. If you invoke the function again while the first event is being processed, Lambda initializes another instance, and the function processes the two events concurrently. As more events come in, Lambda routes them to available instances and creates new instances as needed.

The default regional concurrency quota starts at 1,000 instances. Let's say your function execution time is 10ms, this means you can handle 100,000 executions per second without requesting a quota increase.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/invocation-scaling.html

Answer

Amplify will have no problem with huge traffic spikes, it is really just a wrapper around route 53, Cloudfront, and s3 so for static sites it is pretty much bomb proof.

Scaling: Amplify vs Elastic Beanstalk/CloudFormation

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