I built Taskly about a year ago. Standard MERN stack, ran on a $10/month VPS with PM2 and nginx. It worked fine. Nobody was complaining.

I migrated it to AWS serverless anyway. Partly to learn, partly because I was mass applying to DevOps roles and needed something real to talk about in interviews. "I deployed a hello world Lambda" doesn't cut it.

The app

Task management for small teams. Tasks, projects, teams, calendar, notifications, avatar uploads, productivity stats. About 15 API routes, 6 Mongoose models. React frontend with Context API nothing fancy but enough moving parts that the migration wasn't trivial.

Original stack: Express, session auth, MongoDB, Cloudinary, Resend for emails.

Where I ended up

Request flow: users hit CloudFront for the React app, WAF-filtered API Gateway for the backend.…