dazn-lambda-powertools VS powertools-lambda

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.

One final thing to consider when deciding whether to adopt Lambda Powertools is what features may be in store in the future. The more mature libraries Lambda Powertools Python and Lambda Powertools Java include a number of useful utilities that we may like to see in Lambda Powertools TypeScript. The overall Lambda Powertools Roadmap doesn't tell us very much other than pending dotnet and golang libraries, but we can drill down into TypeScript-specific issues and glimpse the immediate future. It looks like stability is still the main priority, but there are some interesting items like RFC: Testing Factories for AWS Data Objects in the leftmost column.

I eagerly await the general availability of this library and will follow the roadmap to see what's coming up and how I can get involved.

According to Roadmap there is some work on .Net support. Hopefully we will see it soon. Personally, I would like to see nodejs and golang support too.

If switching your development to Python for AWS Lambda Powertools is not for you, I recommend heading over to the AWS Powertools Roadmap and supporting the Typescript and .NET feature requests by adding a 👍.