You shouldn’t need a team of certified DevOps engineers to deploy reliable, scalable, and cost-effective serverless applications. That belief drove our team at Zaelab to rethink how we build and launch modern backend services.
Earlier this year, a small team of Zaelab engineers began building what would become one of our most powerful integrations: a Shopify-native connector for external ERP and CMS systems. With limited resources and a mandate to deliver fast, we initially turned to AWS Lambda for its promise of speed without infrastructure overhead. But despite its serverless branding, Lambda introduced more complexity than it solved.
Eventually, we migrated to DBOS Cloud—a modern, high-performance serverless platform designed to streamline application development. The difference was transformative. Here’s what we learned along the way and why DBOS is now central to Zaelab’s development process.
The Hidden Complexity of AWS Lambda
Lambda promises no servers. But building robust backend apps with AWS quickly spirals into a complex ecosystem of services: Lambda functions, API Gateway, Step Functions, RDS with proxies, and more. Each component demands deep AWS knowledge, and even small missteps can tank performance or security.
We found ourselves spending as much time managing infrastructure as building features—context-switching constantly between writing logic and wrangling configurations. The YAML templates for deploying even simple functions grew bloated. Every addition created nested dependencies and increased fragility.
How DBOS Changed the Game
With DBOS, all of that complexity disappeared.
- Want to expose a function as an HTTP endpoint? Just add
@GetApi()in TypeScript. - Need secure, scalable database access? Use the
@Transaction()decorator—no RDS Proxy required. - Forget managing deeply nested CloudFormation templates—DBOS abstracts the entire backend stack.
This shift let us focus on what Zaelab does best: building modern solutions. With DBOS, feature development felt effortless, freeing our engineers from infrastructure debt and unlocking productivity.
The Real Cost of “Serverless”
Lambda’s cost model can seem attractive—until your app scales. As we added integrations and routes, our AWS costs ballooned. API Gateway, RDS Proxy, monitoring via CloudWatch, and variable Lambda executions pushed our monthly infrastructure spend north of $1,500.
By comparison, DBOS offered flat-rate pricing and eliminated the need for costly service provisioning. With the same functionality and performance, our monthly infrastructure cost dropped by over 15x. It wasn’t just a technical upgrade—it was a financial no-brainer.
Developer Experience that Scales
With DBOS, our local environments matched production perfectly. No more late-stage surprises or rework. Built-in features like once-and-only-once execution, transactional idempotency, and partial retries became available out of the box—previously, these would’ve required custom Step Function setups in AWS.
The result? Faster time-to-value. Features that once took weeks moved from prototype to production in days.
Why Zaelab Builds on DBOS
Zaelab is committed to modernizing how B2B companies sell. That starts with the platforms we use internally. DBOS represents the agility, speed, and simplicity we aim to deliver to our clients.
We’re no longer held back by the limitations of "serverless" solutions that still require hours of configuration. Instead, we’re building smarter, faster, and leaner—just like we help our customers do.
If your team is buried in DevOps overhead or struggling with Lambda complexity, it might be time to rethink what serverless should mean. For Zaelab, the answer was DBOS.
Let’s modernize the way you deliver.
