Serverless Backend Development — Scalable, Secure, Built for New Zealand and Australia
Stop paying for infrastructure you are not using. Smahh builds serverless backends that scale automatically, cost less at rest, and are hardened with the same rigour as our cybersecurity work.
The real cost of running servers you do not need to run
The real cost of running servers you do not need to run is immense. EC2 instances running at 10–20% utilisation most of the day are billing 100% of the time. This is wasted budget that could be spent on product development or marketing.
The operational burden is equally costly: OS patches, managing security groups, capacity planning, and being on-call for server issues take developers away from their core job of building features.
Unexpected traffic spikes often cause outages because the team forgot to scale manually before a launch. Serverless architecture removes this entire layer — the infrastructure is managed by AWS, scales in milliseconds, and costs nothing when idle.
What our serverless backend covers
AWS Lambda functions and REST APIs
Business logic in Lambda functions, exposed through API Gateway with usage plans, throttling, and API keys. Input validation on every endpoint. Least-privilege IAM roles — each function has only the permissions it specifically needs, nothing more. Python or Node.js runtimes. Cold start mitigation via provisioned concurrency on latency-sensitive endpoints. Every function is observable — structured logging, X-Ray tracing, CloudWatch metrics.
Event-driven architectures
SQS queues, SNS topics, and EventBridge rules for decoupled, asynchronous processing. Order processing pipelines, notification systems, data sync workflows, webhook receivers. When one service fails, the rest keep running and the failed message retries. Smahh designs the failure modes before building the happy path.
Serverless databases and storage
DynamoDB for high-throughput key-value access. RDS Postgres with RDS Proxy for relational workloads — the proxy maintains a connection pool so Lambda functions do not exhaust database connections under load. S3 for object storage with bucket policies and encryption enforced. Data modelling reviews included — the most common serverless performance problems are DynamoDB anti-patterns applied to the wrong access pattern.
Authentication and authorisation
AWS Cognito user pools, identity pools, and custom Lambda authorizers. JWT validation at the API Gateway layer before business logic runs. MFA support. Federated identity (Google Sign-In, Apple Sign-In, enterprise SSO via SAML). Smahh's authorizer implementations are reviewed against OWASP authentication guidelines, not just AWS documentation.
Payments and subscription billing
Stripe PaymentIntents, SetupIntents, subscription management, and webhook processing. Webhook signature validation and idempotency keys to prevent duplicate charges. Apple App Store and Google Play in-app purchase verification. Donation and tip flows. Smahh has production experience building Stripe integrations across multiple ANZ platforms.
Infrastructure as code
Serverless Framework v4 or AWS SAM — every Lambda, API Gateway route, DynamoDB table, SQS queue, Cognito pool, and IAM role defined in code. No manual console configuration that cannot be audited, versioned, or reproduced. Separate stacks for dev, staging, and production. Deployments via CI/CD pipeline, not manual uploads.
Why work with Smahh
Security applied to serverless
Smahh's cybersecurity background applied to serverless. IAM roles scoped to the minimum necessary permission. Environment variables managed via Secrets Manager, not .env files. API Gateway WAF rules active on production. These are baseline requirements on every Smahh serverless project.
Production experience
Production experience, not tutorial experience. Smahh has built and operated production serverless platforms handling real Australian and New Zealand user traffic. We know where Lambda breaks under real load and how to design around it before it happens to your users.
Handover you can act on
Full architecture diagram, Serverless Framework configuration explained, runbooks for common operations (adding a new endpoint, rotating a secret, redeploying after a rollback). Your team can operate the system without calling us.
How we work
Architecture review
Map your existing system or design the target serverless architecture, estimate cost model at projected scale.
Security design
Threat model the API surface, scope IAM roles, plan secret management before writing code.
Build in sprints
Incremental delivery, staging environment mirrors production from week one.
Load testing
Simulate production traffic, confirm Lambda concurrency limits, test failure modes.
Security review
Targeted review of IAM, API Gateway config, data handling before launch.
Launch and knowledge transfer
Go-live support, documentation walkthrough, 30-day post-launch cover.
Results we've delivered
* Results vary by starting point and engagement scope.
Frequently asked questions
Serverless means your backend logic runs in managed function containers (like AWS Lambda) that start on demand, scale automatically, and cost nothing when idle. It is well-suited for APIs with variable or unpredictable traffic, background processing jobs, webhook handlers, and businesses wanting to avoid infrastructure management overhead. It is less suited to workloads requiring more than 15 minutes of continuous processing or very low latency requirements under 50 milliseconds.
The cost model changes from pay-per-hour (EC2) to pay-per-invocation (Lambda). At low to medium traffic, serverless is almost always cheaper — you pay for actual compute used, not idle time. At very high, sustained traffic with predictable load, reserved EC2 instances can be more cost-effective. Smahh provides a cost projection model as part of the architecture review so you know what to expect before committing.
AWS Lambda has a published SLA of 99.95%. It is used in production by companies processing hundreds of millions of requests per day. The reliability risks in serverless come not from Lambda itself but from poorly designed event-driven systems — unhandled errors, missing dead-letter queues, insufficient retry logic. Smahh designs these failure modes explicitly rather than discovering them in production.
A cold start occurs when a Lambda function has been idle and needs to initialise before handling a request. For Python functions, this typically adds 200–500ms on the first request. Smahh mitigates this on latency-sensitive endpoints using provisioned concurrency (Lambda instances kept warm) and lightweight function initialisation patterns. For most business API use cases, cold starts are not a material user experience issue.
Yes, though not every backend should be migrated wholesale. Smahh typically recommends a strangler fig approach — identifying the highest-value components (spiky APIs, background jobs, webhook handlers) and migrating them first while leaving stable, long-running components in place. Full migration timelines range from 4 weeks (simple API) to 6 months (complex monolith).
AWS regional outages are rare but real. Smahh designs for this in two ways: firstly, using multi-AZ deployment within the primary region (Sydney ap-southeast-2 for most ANZ workloads) for resilience against single availability zone failures. Secondly, for clients requiring cross-region failover, we design active-passive or active-active multi-region architectures with Route 53 health checks and automated failover.
Ready to scale without servers?
Talk to our team about modernising your backend architecture.
Talk to our team