dazn-lambda-powertools VS powertools-lambda-typescript

I'm a big fan of TypeScript and in fact co-authored a book about it. I don't find myself using Java or Python much, so while I've been interested in Lambda Powertools, I never tried it out until now. Lambda Powertools TypeScript joins middy and DAZN Lambda Powertools in the Lambda tooling space for the Node.js runtime. Two things that differentiate Lambda Powertools TypeScript from comparable libraries are it is sponsored by AWS and it supports decorators.

The next natural step was to look at middleware such as Middy to decorate the main business logic, and allow these tasks to be defined once and used consistently. I remember listening to a Comic Relief talk about their Lambda wrapper back in 2019. Since then, I was introduced by Yan Cui to DAZN Lambda Powertools, which was the inspiration for this new project.

You might be interested in the logger/correlation ID features of https://github.com/getndazn/dazn-lambda-powertools - been super useful for us so far.

Nevertheless, log files are an important resource to debug problems and to get deeper insights into the behavior of a serverless system. Every logged detail might help to identify issues and to fix bugs and problems. Structured logging is important as log files can be analyzed much easier (e.g. with AWS CloudWatch Insights) which will save time and engineering costs. The dazn-lambda-powertools library provides a logger that supports structured logging for Node.js, the AWS Lambda Powertools offer the same for Python and Java.

The Powertools GitHub repository offers nice examples to integrate and learn from. For example here are nice example written in AWS CDK. Following I will list the features I gained some experience with.

Lambda Powertools TypeScript can't be used directly as an ES Modules dependency, but there is an issue open, so please consider adding your +1. For now, it's possible to get by with a require shim or via cjs tricks but it would be great to see native support for ES Modules in Lambda Powertools TypeScript.

for secrets, I would recommend using AWS PowerTools if you can (depending on your language) - https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-powertools-python - https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-powertools-typescript

The documentation for Lambda Powertools TypeScript is pretty good and provides several examples with even more on GitHub.

Last week, AWS announced the beta release of AWS Lambda Powertools Typescript. This is a suite of TypeScript utilities for AWS Lambda functions to enable the adoption of best practices in areas such as structured logging, tracing and custom metrics.