deno-lambda VS powertools-lambda

Using Deno with AWS Lambda functions requires a custom runtime. You can build your own runtime or use one that already exists. If you’re concerned about security, I suggest maintaining a copy of an existing runtime and carefully inspecting updates or creating your own runtime. For this proof of concept, I deployed the Serverless Application Repository (SAR) app for Deno into my AWS account. I used the included Lambda layer and the provided.al2 Lambda runtime to create my Deno Lambda function. I created a file called index.ts with some basic JavaScript code that makes requests to two different websites and returns the HTTP status code of the response or a caught error. I then updated the function’s configuration to reference the exported handler function.

I'm doing a simple PoC / testing with Deno using https://github.com/hayd/deno-lambda and specifically the CDK instructions.

As I had mentioned, it requires using a Lambda Layer. See: https://github.com/hayd/deno-lambda/blob/2d90756a0f18b57f16e...

Using your own image (i.e. without using the base AWS image with the layer) you'd get even worse cold start times.

Decorators and TypeScript aren't supported out of the box in Lambda (without using deno) so we'll also need a transpilation step if we go this route. Fortunately this is a mostly solved problem for AWS CDK, AWS SAM and Serverless Framework users. If you want or need to roll your own, esbuild is a great place to start and seems to be the bundler of choice for this purpose.

In addition to the stuff posted here, there's the deno-lambda project for deploying to AWS Lambda

Cloud hosting support. Deno runs fine in a container, but lambda/cloud function support is difficult on most providers. deno-lambda exists but it only applies to AWS and can't be used with all CICD tools. Deno Deploy also exists but it's pretty new.

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 👍.