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Planning to Build a Blog Commenting System with Lambda and DynamoDB, part 2

Published: April 8, 2018
Last Updated: December 5, 2020

Well during the last post I said that I didn’t think long enough or hard enough before deciding to build out a commenting system using Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway and Cognito.

While writing that post I realized just how much work it would be. I spent a few hours yesterday and went back on my previous decision to just build one. While I think it would be a worthwhile project, there were a few key things that are holding me back at this point.

CloudFormation would take a long time to get right
The Serverless Application Model documentation is unclear about some parts
Not a lot of information on debugging Golang Lambda functions locally
I can just use Disqus

I think the fractured documentation on setting this up with CloudFormation is the one thing that really made me decide to go another route. CloudFormation is something I want to learn more about, but it’s not really at the top of my priority list right now. I kind of don’t want to embark on a 3 or 4 month side project that doesn’t really align with what I would rather be learning in my free time.

I could have built it out without using CloudFormation, but that would have made it hard to share with others so that they could deploy it into their own environment.

I think I’ll take a slower approach to this and get used to using CloudFormation with some other side projects that aren’t such a large undertaking. I don’t use any AWS stuff at work so while I do like doing it, there are a few things I could better focus my learning on career wise.

So part 2 of this is basically me putting this project on hold and deciding to use Disqus.