serverless-application-model VS esbuild

The complete solution with SAM is available here.

There are many options to deploy Serverless Applications in AWS and one of them is SAM, the Serverless Application Model. I chose to use it here, because it doesn't add too many layers of abstraction between what's being deployed and the code we write and our infrastructure is quite simple.

The solution uses AWS SAM with the global configuration for Lambda functions and the public API you can use to access Apache Zeppelin. The stack deployment provides the URL as an output value.

When you combine this with the AWS Serverless Application Model you can also very easily include your dependencies. Or use a compiled language like golang for your Lambda functions. You simply run sam build before you run the aws cloudformation package and aws cloudformation deploy commands. SAM will build the binary and update the template to point to the newly built binary. Package will then upload it to S3 and replace the local reference to the S3 location. Deploy can then create or update the stack or you can use the CloudFormation integration in CodePipeline.

I'm a big fan of using an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach for any project. My go to tools for this are the Servlerless Application Model (SAM) and it's associated CLI (SAM CLI). For more official use cases and for cross platform apps I typically use Terraform.

AWS SAM

Kicking off the tour and not starting a war, but I'm going to be using the Serverless Application Model.

The diagram here is super simple. I'm going to write something a little later that shows how this code could fit into a bigger workflow, but for now, I'm keeping it basic. And yes, that's the SAM Squirrel in there.

Interestingly, AWS CDK and SAM are both explicitly mentioned. While CDK broadly addresses Infrastructure as Code, SAM is highlighted for its role in developing serverless data pipelines - a hugely underrated concept.

Naturally, there are several options available to declare your cloud resources. The options with the most popularity are the CDK, AWS CloudFormation, SST, Serverless framework, Terraform, and AWS SAM. There are others, but when talking about Infrastructure as Code (IaC), these are the ones you hear about most often.

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.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.

Bundling with esbuild

Besides Webpack, there are many other popular web bundlers available, such as Parcel, Esbuild, Rollup, and more. They all have their own unique features and strengths, and you should make your decision based on the needs and requirements of your specific project. Please refer to their official websites for details.