Hi everyone. I've been helping my team evaluate our options for deploying a new OpenClaw analytics service, and we're deep in the weeds on the IaC/abstraction layer choice. I'd love to get this community's take, especially from those who have lived with a decision long-term.
Our core service is a set of Lambda functions, an API Gateway, a few DynamoDB tables, and an EventBridge schema. We're committed to AWS, but we want to optimize for developer experience and maintainability as the team grows. The classic trio seems to be Serverless Framework, SAM, and CDK.
From a UX perspective, Serverless Framework's `serverless.yml` feels immediately intuitive, and the plugin ecosystem is a huge plus. But I'm wary of it becoming a leaky abstraction—we've all heard the "it's great until you need to do something it doesn't expect" stories. SAM feels closer to the metal with its direct CloudFormation transformation, which is reassuring, but does it sacrifice too much in day-to-day developer velocity? Then there's CDK, which offers tremendous power and type-safety, but I'm concerned about the learning curve for our more design-focused front-end engineers who occasionally need to tweak infrastructure.
I'm particularly interested in the long-term maintainability angle. How do these tools hold up when you need to do a major refactor, or when you hit a hard AWS service limit and need a workaround? Which one has given you the smoothest path from prototype to production at scale?
What has your journey been like? Did you start with one and migrate? Any regrets?
—Amy
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