Cloud
Why we would build a permit portal on serverless services
Resident-facing services have spiky demand and small budgets. Pay-per-use architecture fits both.
A permit portal is idle at 3 a.m. and slammed the week before a deadline. Traditional hosting sizes for the peak and pays for it all year. Serverless services size themselves. For a resident-facing application with this demand pattern, that is the right default.
The shape of the architecture
A static front end served from a content delivery network. APIs implemented as functions that run only when called. A managed database. Object storage for uploaded plans and documents. A queue for background work such as notifications and integrations with the permitting system of record. Managed identity for resident accounts. All defined as infrastructure as code.
What the agency gets
No servers to patch. Capacity for deadline week without planning for it. A bill that tracks usage. High availability by default. A deployment that can be rebuilt from code.
What to watch
Cold starts. Rarely used functions can add latency on first call. Provisioned concurrency or a lighter runtime addresses it where it matters.
Vendor-specific services. Some components are portable; some are not. Keep the business logic separate from the provider's glue so a move is possible.
Observability. Distributed pieces need tracing and centralized logs from the start.
Cost at scale. Very high sustained traffic can cost more than dedicated capacity. Model it. Most agency services never get there.
Data classification. Uploaded documents may contain personal information; storage, retention, and access follow the same rules as anywhere else.
Integration with the system of record
The portal is a front end. Permits live in the permitting platform, reached through its API. That keeps the portal replaceable and the record authoritative.
For agencies
When a vendor proposes hosting, ask how it handles peaks, what it costs when idle, what is patched by whom, and how the environment is rebuilt. Serverless answers those questions well for this class of service.