Back in 2019, I started a personal project that eventually grew into a 192-page book: Serverless Web Apps with Python and AWS Lambda.
The motivation was simple—I wanted to learn serverless technologies hands-on, test ideas, and organize my research into something structured. Writing it helped me think more clearly about trade-offs and patterns, and even though I eventually realized the approach I took wasn't always the best, it turned into an invaluable learning experience. And yes, every page was written without AI—just me, Python, and a lot of trial and error.
How the Landscape Has Changed
Since then, the world has moved quickly. Platforms like Vercel, new serverless-native frameworks, and the explosion of AI-driven tooling have made serverless development far more mainstream—most often through the Node.js ecosystem.
Back in 2019, though, Python felt like a natural choice. It had strong adoption in web development (Django, Flask) and was already popular for scripting on AWS. The book reflects that moment in time, experimenting with how far we could push Python into the serverless space.
What the Book Covers
Here's a snapshot of what you'll find inside:
- Serverless fundamentals: what it means to build apps without managing servers, and how AWS Lambda fits into the picture.
- Python on AWS Lambda: exploring the benefits, limitations, and quirks of using Python in a serverless architecture.
- Framework comparisons: including hands-on work with the Serverless Framework (then AWS's recommended option) as well as alternatives like Zappa and Chalice.
- Django in a serverless world: experiments with running a traditionally monolithic framework like Django on Lambda.
Performance deep dives:
- Cold starts vs. warm starts
- Benchmarking runtimes
- Analyzing the impact of different configurations
Note: Some of the raw performance results are published separately in my serverless-performance repository.
- Deployment and tooling: packaging, deploying, and monitoring applications without managing infrastructure.
- Lessons learned: where serverless shines, where it struggles, and how trade-offs shift depending on language and framework.
Why Share It Now
For years, this book sat unfinished and unpublished. But even though technology has evolved, I think some of the findings are still interesting—especially the performance research and framework comparisons.
If you're curious about how serverless looked from the Python side of things, or you just enjoy digging into experiments from the early days of Lambda web apps, I think you'll find some useful insights inside.
Read the Book
You can browse the full text here:
📖 Read the Book 'Serverless Web Apps with Python and AWS Lambda' on GitHub.
It may not be the perfect guide, but it's a snapshot of a moment in time, and a reminder of how much we can learn simply by diving in, experimenting, and writing things down.
Technology evolves quickly, but the lessons we learn from hands-on experimentation remain valuable. Sometimes the journey matters more than the destination.