SST: the future of serverless on AWS

Finding tools that combine simplicity, power and flexibility is like discovering a hidden gem.

Today we want to share our experience with SST (Serverless Stack), a framework that is revolutionizing our approach to serverless development, allowing us to create cloud native applications with unprecedented speed.

SST is an open-source framework that drastically simplifies the development of serverless applications on AWS. Unlike other tools, SST offers an extremely smooth local development experience, while maintaining full compatibility with cloud infrastructure.

What makes SST really special is its developer-first approach: while many tools force you to choose between development speed and production power, SST allows you to have both. The philosophy behind SST is clear: eliminate the gap between the local development environment and the cloud production environment, allowing developers to build serverless applications without compromises.

HeroHubs immediately adopted SST for some key projects and the results were surprising.

Development times were reduced by 40%, mainly thanks to local hot-reloading of Lambda functions, which allowed us to iterate much faster.

This feature alone transformed our development process, eliminating those dead times of waiting that previously slowed down our creative flow.

Another significant advantage we noticed was the onboarding of collaborators, which now takes days instead of weeks.

The learning curve is considerably gentler compared to other serverless frameworks we had used in the past. Team members manage to become productive almost immediately, easily understanding both the application architecture and the deployment processes.

Speaking of deployment, those based on SST turned out to be more reliable and free of surprises. SST’s “staging” system ensures that what works locally works in production too, saving us those frustrating post-deployment debugging sessions that were previously the norm rather than the exception.

The ability to define the entire infrastructure as code has also made it possible to quickly replicate the entire pipeline for new clients or use cases, significantly accelerating implementation times and reducing the risk of configuration errors.

Advantages

If you are a technology decision maker, SST offers concrete advantages that go far beyond purely technical considerations. The significant reduction in Time to Market is probably the most evident.

Operational costs have drastically decreased thanks to the pay-per-use approach of serverless, optimized by the framework. An application that previously required dedicated servers now scales automatically based on load, reducing costs in low usage moments and guaranteeing optimal performance in traffic peaks.

Guaranteed scalability without the need to manage complex infrastructures is another point in favor of SST. Our clients no longer have to worry about server capacity, load balancers or other infrastructural aspects: everything is managed automatically.

Finally, we found lower technological risks thanks to solid TypeScript typing and the transparency of infrastructure as code.

Every change is traceable, testable and reversible, significantly reducing the possibility of critical errors in production.

Our direct experience

Since we started using SST, we noticed a cultural change in the way we approach certain issues. The frustration related to long deploy cycles has been replaced by greater focus on business logic and innovation.

SST allowed us to say yes to projects that we would have refused before for timing or technical complexity issues. It literally expanded our business possibilities.

SST is much more than what we could describe in this article. If you are curious to discover how it could transform your projects too, visit sst.dev.

Our experience confirms that the transition to this framework is not just a technological change, but a real leap in quality in the way of conceiving and realizing cloud applications.