How Delphi ships 100 times a day with its Python backend on Vercel
By Steven Van ·
Delphi moved off AWS to Vercel, cutting a new engineer's first deploy from a full day to the same workflow everyone else uses.
Delphi, which builds "digital minds" that let people tap into someone else's recorded expertise, moved its Python backend onto Vercel six months ago. The backend had previously run on AWS with ECS, Docker Desktop and local databases, a setup that, according to founding engineer Spencer Schoeben, took a full day of environment setup before a new engineer could make their first deploy. Fixing that on AWS would have meant designing and owning infrastructure, which the team didn't want to do.
The rebuild depended on Vercel Workflows and Vercel Queues, features that didn't exist when Delphi was founded and that the backend needs for its long-running and queued background jobs. With frontend and backend now on the same platform, Delphi's 10 engineers, including product and design, make 100+ production deploys a day behind feature flags, with no one on the team in a dedicated infrastructure role.