s3patch

My wife and I had spent the past few months travelling in France and Scotland. When we weren't exploring the local culture, we were tinkering on some side projects. This meant a lot of back and forth uploading nodejs and Scala apps to S3, so that they could run in AWS Lambda.

This worked great...except for when we were in a place where the upload bandwidth was about 50 KB/sec and the Internet was unusable for anything else while uploading.

So, I wondered: instead of uploading the mostly-unchanged app each time, could we ship a patch and have it be recreated on the other end?

After a day of cobbling together some CloudFormation and Lambda code, I had a really crappy JavaScript proof of concept. And it worked! Instead of 5 infuriating minutes, updating my code took only a matter of seconds.

This was the kernel of what would become s3patch, but I put it on the backburner while working on other projects.