Architecting MediaNexus: A Serverless Approach to High-Availability Aggregation

Challenge: Handling Complexity Without Operational Overhead

Building a platform that aggregates terabytes of metadata from multiple external APIs—while maintaining sub-second search speeds for global users—usually requires a massive infrastructure team. Our goal was to build a system that was highly available, endlessly scalable, and required near-zero maintenance.

Solution: AWS Serverless & Infrastructure as Code

We adopted a strictly cloud-native approach using Node.js (TypeScript) and AWS, managed entirely via Terraform for reproducible infrastructure.

• Database Strategy: We rejected traditional relational databases in favor of Amazon DynamoDB. Its NoSQL structure handles our complex, high-velocity metadata ingestion with single-digit millisecond latency, regardless of catalog size.

• Event-Driven Synchronization: Instead of monolith servers, we deployed a fleet of AWS Lambda functions. Triggered by cron schedules, these serverless workers fetch, validate, and update data from external APIs (Jesus Film, GRN, Bible Brain) in parallel.

• Security First: We implemented a custom Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system using AWS Cognito, strictly separating Admin management capabilities from User consumption layers.

Impact:

• Zero-Maintenance Scale: The serverless architecture allows MediaNexus to scale from 10 to 10,000 concurrent users automatically, with no manual server provisioning.

• Cost Efficiency: By utilizing a hybrid storage model (linking to external assets vs. hosting) and pay-per-use compute (Lambda/DynamoDB), operational costs are minimized.

Robust Reliability: The system achieved high availability targets immediately upon launch, with Terraform ensuring that Staging and Production environments remain perfectly synced.