What happens when the best architectural decision is to recognize what you don’t need to build?
While building Vibe Village, one of the most consequential decisions wasn’t choosing Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, or even a multi-Region strategy. It was deciding where AWS should end and the native capabilities of the client platform should begin.
Vibe Village takes a serverless-first approach to its AWS architecture, but serverless is only part of the story. Apple SharePlay handles real-time participant coordination for Listening Sessions, while AWS provides durable application state, compute, data services, resilience, observability, and AI-enabled capabilities around the experience.
That separation helped shape an architecture in which Lambda compute spans four U.S. AWS Regions, selected data is replicated according to resilience requirements, and AI enhances the product without becoming part of the critical path.
In my first article for AWS Builder Center, I explore those decisions, the tradeoffs behind them, and an equally important question:
If I were designing Vibe Village again today, what would I do differently?