Top all-time · #2568
Yan Cui
Personal blog · theburningmonk.comprogrammingsystems
Yan Cui's personal blog at theburningmonk.com covers programming and systems. Since 2011, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 94 times, most often “Choreography vs. Orchestration in the Land of Serverless”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Yan Cui's serverless posts on AWS Lambda cold starts and per-ms cost, DynamoDB, Cognito, and orchestration versus choreography, usually to support points about serverless architecture.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Learn to build production-ready serverless applications on AWS
Most-linked posts?
- Choreography vs. Orchestration in the Land of Serverless3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-08-14
- The case for and against Amazon Cognito3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-04-20
- We can do better than percentile latencies2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-25
- Fear and Loathing in APL (2015)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-11
- You don't need to test every line of your CDK application2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-14
- Replacing API schema coupling with semantics2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-29
- Elm – functional reactive dreams and missile command2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-07-22
- Lambda layer: not a package manager, but a deployment optimization2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-14
- You are thinking about serverless costs all wrong2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-14
What Hacker News says?
I wrote this in another comment here, but just so you don't miss it: Don't. Dependencies for the dynamic languages matter A LOT! Take a look at what it'll cost you for requiring the AWS SDK in Node.js, for your cold starts https://theburningmonk.com/2019/03/just-how-expensive-is-the... Personal benchmarks puts Rust as the most optimal language that I've tried to run on AWS Lambda so far.
Comment linking /2019/03/just-how-expensive-is-the-full-aws-sdk/
on “AWS Lambda pricing now per ms”Submitted Modelling game economy with Neo4j as a story · 125 points
HN discussionDependencies for the dynamic languages matter A LOT! Take a look at what it'll cost you for requiring the AWS SDK in Node.js, for your cold starts https://theburningmonk.com/2019/03/just-how-expensive-is-the... .
Comment linking /2019/03/just-how-expensive-is-the-full-aws-sdk/
on “AWS Lambda pricing now per ms”Submitted Fear and Loathing in APL (2015) as a story · 90 points
HN discussionWould've loved to see http://servicestack.net on this list which has great performance on .NET and Mono: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Real-world... And also maintains .NET's fastest JSON and Text Serializers: http://theburningmonk.com/2011/11/performance-test-json-seri...
Comment linking /2011/11/performance-test-json-serializers-part-ii/
on “Web Framework Benchmarks”Submitted Beware of “async void” in C# as a story · 54 points
HN discussionYes. The orchestration vs choreography problem. https://theburningmonk.com/2020/08/choreography-vs-orchestra...
Comment linking /2020/08/choreography-vs-orchestration-in-the-land-of-serverless/
on “Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails”Submitted Fear and Loathing with APL as a story · 48 points
HN discussionA lot of things that used to be a concern (hot partitions, etc) are not a concern anymore and most have been solved these days :) Put it on on-demand pricing (it'll be better and cheaper for you most likely), and it will handle any load you throw at it. Can you get it to throttle? Sure, if you absolutely blast it without ever having had that high of a need before (and it can actually be avoided[0]). You will need to…
Comment linking /2019/03/understanding-the-scaling-behaviour-of-dynamodb-ondemand-tables/
on “DynamoDB 10 years later”Submitted You are thinking about serverless costs all wrong as a story · 32 points
HN discussionThe link invites readers to explore our MCP directory https://www.anthropic.com/partners/mcp The CloudFlare and Linear MCP servers (at a minimum) seem to use the same approach, the mcp-remote npm package, e.g. https://github.com/cloudflare/mcp-server-cloudflare/tree/mai... { "mcpServers": { "cloudflare": { "command": "npx", "args": ["mcp-remote", "https://builds.mcp.cloudflare.com/sse"] } } } But mcp-remote is clear…
Comment linking /2015/06/craftconf15-takeaways-from-jepsen-iv-hope-springs-eternal/
on “Remote MCP Support in Claude Code”Submitted Takeaways from “Measuring micro-services” as a story · 28 points
HN discussionEvery year or so I check back in to see if Cognito has gotten any better. I hasn't. I'd love to use it, but some very basic things are just not done correctly. Yan Cui has a nice writeup on Cognito [0] that touches on some of its shortcomings. [0]: https://theburningmonk.com/2021/03/the-case-for-and-against-...
Comment linking /2021/03/the-case-for-and-against-amazon-cognito/
on “Auth0 Down”Submitted Choreography vs. Orchestration in the Land of Serverless as a story · 25 points
HN discussion> The point is pretty moot though, because you can schedule Cloudwatch Events every 4 minutes to keep a lambda warm, if necessary. I encourage you to read this article, https://theburningmonk.com/2018/01/im-afraid-youre-thinking-... , because if you're running a web API with Lambdas, keeping one instance warm with the "cloudwatch event every 4 minutes" trick will most definitely not solve your cold start issues.
Comment linking /2018/01/im-afraid-youre-thinking-about-aws-lambda-cold-starts-all-wrong/
on “AWS Service Operator for Kubernetes Now Available”Submitted Serverless Architecture – All you need to know about caching as a story · 25 points
HN discussionI think there are times when the graph model shines. https://theburningmonk.com/2015/04/modelling-game-economy-wi... I read this article I found on HN a few years ago, and for some reason it came to my mind just now. The neat thing about the graph model of course is being more immediately expressive to the query-er, and that takes cognitive load away from that person. I'll never say a bad thing about SQL or the rela…
Comment linking /2015/04/modelling-game-economy-with-neo4j/
on “A one-size-fits-all database doesn't fit anyone”Submitted Smallest .Net reference type takes 12 bytes (consider using value types) as a story · 15 points
HN discussionI've started reading this book and I rate it highly so far: Serverless Development on AWS [0]. I agree that finding comprehensive, non-sales-oriented best practices can be challenging. One useful resource is Serverless Land from AWS [1], which offers a collection of practical examples and articles. Mastering serverless involves more than just wiring up functions—it's about adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC) princ…
Comment linking /
on “The unwritten laws of engineering at Stedi”Submitted Takeaways from “The Hidden Dimension of Refactoring” as a story · 10 points
HN discussioncheckout http://theburningmonk.com/ for good posts on some serverless topics you've mentioned
Comment linking /
on “Serverless dev practices questions”Submitted The case for and against Amazon Cognito as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Combine convenience of duck typing with static safety with F# as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Comparing Scala's case class to F#'s discriminated unions as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Securely Let Front End Apps to Directly Access AWS Services as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lambda layer: not a package manager, but a deployment optimization as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Are Lambda-to-Lambda calls so bad? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hit the 6MB Lambda payload limit? Here's what you can do as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Contrasting F# and Elm’s record types as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Testing and CI/CD strategies with serverless architectures as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
