Deploying Next.js on AWS Without the Headache
A practical walkthrough of deploying a production Next.js app on AWS with SST, covering edge caching, environment management, and CI/CD.
Why Look Beyond Managed Platforms?
Managed platforms like Vercel provide an exceptional out-of-the-box experience for Next.js applications. However, as enterprise usage scales, bandwidth costs and serverless compute markups can grow dramatically. Deploying Next.js directly to your own AWS infrastructure provides massive cost savings, data residency compliance, and seamless integration with existing AWS VPC resources (RDS, Redis, S3).
Infrastructure as Code with SST Ion
SST (Serverless Stack) solves the complexity of configuring CloudFront distributions, Lambda@Edge routers, S3 asset buckets, and IAM roles manually. With SST Ion powered by Pulumi, you can define your entire Next.js deployment in a few lines of declarative TypeScript.
// sst.config.ts
export default $config({
app(input) {
return {
name: "portfolio-app",
removal: input?.stage === "production" ? "retain" : "remove",
};
},
async run() {
new sst.aws.Nextjs("MyPortfolio", {
domain: "ezazul.dev",
environment: {
DATABASE_URL: process.env.DATABASE_URL!,
},
});
},
});Edge Caching and Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR)
One of the biggest historical hurdles with self-hosted Next.js was supporting ISR and on-demand cache revalidation across serverless instances. SST leverages AWS S3 as an incremental cache store with CloudFront cache invalidation triggers, ensuring static generation works identically to first-party hosting platforms.
Summary & Best Practices
By adopting modern IaC tooling like SST, indie developers and engineering teams can achieve enterprise-grade reliability, sub-second global edge performance, and low AWS bills without managing low-level EC2 servers or container orchestration clusters.