Session Setting: Build, Break, Repeat
Delivered a keynote lightning session at AWS Community Day 2026 Manila, part of the marquee ‘Build, Break, Repeat’ track, to a room of cloud architects, devops practitioners, and software engineers gathered under AWS User Group Philippines.
Architecture Breakdown: From $100 Surge to Zero-Idle Cost
The session explored what happens when a serverless architecture looks right on paper but fails under real traffic — and how to diagnose and rebuild it without downtime. Covered the architectural pivot:
- Client Delivery Shift — Moving from dynamic server-side rendering on AWS Amplify to a static SPA served through Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront CDN.
- Compute Optimization — Refactoring backend services to FastAPI (Python) running on AWS Lambda container images via the Lambda Web Adapter (LWA).
- Database & State Management — Transitioning to Supabase PostgreSQL with connection pooling and atomic database operations to eliminate transaction lockups.
Production Metrics & Engineering Lessons
Walked through the real-world case study of Enchanted Crown (engineered and shipped in 20 days):
- Launch Day Crisis — Cloud spend crossing $100 in under 24 hours under unoptimized compute cycles.
- Re-Architected Production Results — Reliably served 12,865 registered voters and 292,819 cast ballots at 99.9% uptime.
- Financial Bottom Line — Rebuilt the entire workload to run at near-zero hosting cost within the AWS Free Tier.