// the take
A tutorial project that replicates the core of how Vercel works: an API server spins up AWS ECS tasks to clone and build repos, pushes output to S3, and a reverse proxy serves the static assets per subdomain. It's a companion to a YouTube series, not a production tool.
The architecture is sound and educational — ECS for isolated build tasks is exactly how you'd actually do this at small scale. Using Redis pub/sub to stream build logs to the frontend via Socket.io is a nice touch that makes the system feel live. The S3 subdomain proxy pattern correctly mirrors Vercel's actual static hosting model. For someone learning cloud infrastructure concepts, the three-service split makes the boundaries clear.
Last commit was May 2024 and it's clearly finished as a tutorial artifact, not maintained software. The 'TypeScript' label is misleading — the backend is plain JavaScript (.js files throughout), only the Next.js frontend uses TS. There's no authentication, no isolation between users' deployments, no cost controls on ECS task spawning — run this publicly and anyone can trigger unlimited builds on your AWS account. Setup requires manual ARN wiring through env vars with zero validation or error guidance.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in July 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →