nitric VS ncc

If you haven't used the Nitric SDK before, then start with this tutorial.

For all those on the hunt for a framework, Nitric is here for you. It's a multi-language framework that helps teams quickly build cloud applications. Nitric unites backend and infrastructure code and automates the process of provisioning and deploying infrastructure. The first major version brings a bunch of changes including significant improvements to the Nitric CLI to support productive cloud development. There's also new architecture visualizations and a new SDK for building and extending Nitric providers. Congrats to the team on shipping your very first version 🥳.

You may have heard of the open source Nitric framework that my team and I have been developing – it’s a cloud-aware application framework that provides a seamless dev experience and confident cloud deployments. Put simply, Nitric handles the infrastructure and runtime requirements of your application, so you can focus your efforts on building it.

Compare the following diagram to the one shown above. This flow addresses some of the concerns raised previously by using an automation framework to eliminate some of the assets that were originally manually crafted. We’re using our open source Nitric Framework in this example; other tools can be used to automate pieces of this flow as well.

If you haven't used the Nitric SDK before, then start with this tutorial to get your project scaffolded and ready to run.

In this exploration, we created a Profile Management API using Nitric, handled core profile operations, and extended it for image management.

On the server-side, you will typically use Zod validation in your route handlers, immediately after receiving a request. Here's an example using the Nitric framework:

Nitric is a serverless framework for rapidly developing and deploying cloud applications.

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

You could use ncc to compile a binary:

https://github.com/vercel/ncc

This appears to be caused by lazy loading of image layer data, particularly during container initialization, and latency introduced by the read operations. In general, you want to access as few files and as little data as possible during the initialization of your functions. For example, we've seen improvement when using ncc to bundle Node.js applications.

What we do however, is bundle all these dependencies, and our own code into a single JS file using the nifty ncc tool (thanks Vercel!)

Vercel's ncc compiler

The most unclear and confusing part is packing the code using ncc. The necessity of this step is caused by GitHub’s approach to running your Action.

I filed an issue for the ncc bundler regarding a similar behavior

This may be slightly tangential but I recently discovered ncc[1] from vercel which can take a single node project and compile it and all dependencies to a single file.

As an added benefit it also collapses all contained dependencies license files into a single licenses.txt file too!

- [1] https://github.com/vercel/ncc

The current process of building a package locally is by running through a gulp task, using ttypescript to compile the TS and @vercel/ncc to build the binary: