u/diiiietcoke

Hey everyone,

I’m currently building an app and would love some feedback from people who have scaled similar architectures.

My current stack is:
Node.js + Express for the backend
DynamoDB as the database

Deployed in a serverless setup for now
The app is still in the early stages, so I haven’t optimized heavily yet. I’m trying to understand what kind of traffic/load this architecture can comfortably handle before I need to make major changes.

A few questions:
Roughly how many active users or requests per second could a setup like this handle before performance becomes a concern?
In your experience, what tends to become the first bottleneck: Lambda cold starts, DynamoDB throughput, API design, external integrations, etc.?
At what point did you start investing in more advanced scaling strategies?
What would the next scaling steps typically look like for this stack?

API Gateway optimizations?

DynamoDB partition/key redesign?

Caching with Redis?
Moving some workloads to containers/ECS/Kubernetes?

Event-driven processing with queues? Iam using AWS SQS. And also redis

I’m less interested in theoretical maximums and more interested in real-world experiences from people running production workloads.
Any lessons learned, traffic numbers, architecture diagrams, or scaling stories would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!