Hi @tomlarkworthy, and thanks for the reply! 
I really enjoy your many notebooks and appreciate that you share how to integrate Observable, Firebase and Stripe. It’s also super cool how you show how to deploy servers-ide cells with Firebase, and from there hosting a web page. While I admittedly haven’t followed your tutorials step-by-step yet, I have read them completely (and your other notebooks – thanks for your announcement, from which I started following you) and they look like they would provide me exactly the functionality that I’ve been looking for.
Thanks also for pointing me to Amplify. The O AWS notebooks also provided a ‘bonus’ require method for Amplify. The trouble that I have in using it is that it seems to be closely tied to React (or similar) and/or Webpack. This is all pretty far over my head for the moment.
With respect to my resistance to move away from the AWS ecosystem toward Google or other solutions is a matter of legacy. I came to AWS back in 2010 to set up cloud servers on EC2. At the time, I wanted to do things like to deploy a wiki to store the institutional documents and linked information for a company I once worked for, to create an run our own VPNs to get around ‘the Great Firewall’ (don’t do this now; I think it’s illegal and in any event all my VPNs are found and closed in a day), to automate a backup-over-internet routine for company computers, etc. Since that time, I started using AWS for more things, and have come to be particularly reliant on S3 as a data store for GIS files, research papers, photographs, and other digital media. Over the years, I’ve grown comfortable with EC2 and S3 integrations, I have decent capacities using AWS CLI for this work, I’ve grown better with IAM roles, but that’s about it. Following Mike’s serverless recipe was one of my first times dabbling with Lambda, and that notebook showed me that there is indeed a way to write data from Observable to S3 securely.
Since starting this post, I am happy to share that I started working with @noise-machines to learn how to make this happen (in response to this call for EoIs). I imagine Thomas (and his colleagues at DataJoy) will be sharing a ‘helper library’ and ‘how to’ tutorial with us very soon, and I look forward to sharing.
I really, really appreciate all the generous people in this community! Thank you for your time, insight, and notebooks!