Regarding using lambda for a REST API, just set up API gateway endpoint in proxy mode, and run all your endpoints from one lambda, will be much simpler, and if

Regarding using lambda for a REST API, just set up API gateway endpoint in proxy mode, and run all your endpoints from one lambda, will be much simpler, and if you use a decent framework, it will be really simple to convert your app into a regular daemon process if you ever decide to move off lambda. Regarding cloudformation, I view manually writing cloudformation json/yaml as an anti-pattern. I would recommend looking at using CDK, which is a framework for writing your cloudformation stacks as actual real code, not markup. It's a great tool, and I find it enormously more productive and expressive than terraform. CDK allows you to write CDK apps in a variety of languages, but I would recommend just using typescript, since that's what its written in. I tried the java bindings, but it was pretty clunky. For a non-AWS specific CDK like experience, you could also look at using pulumi, but I haven't really used it much myself. Trying to define infrastructure purely by declarative markup based languages is such a waste of time.