serverless-microservices-graphql-template VS serverless-bundle

For those that know me, they know I love talking about two things more than anything: Serverless Framework and GraphQL. Today, I'm excited to announce a project starter template that I've been developing that allows developers to build serverless microservices with GraphQL. It is built using Nx monorepos and provides a lot of quality of life developer tooling out-of-the-box. I'll discuss what's in the repo and how you can leverage it today for your own projects. If you want to jump into the code, you can find it on GitHub.

As you can see in the above handler.js file, we're getting CommonJS instead of modern JavaScript or TypeScript. To get these, you need webpack or some other bundler. serverless-webpack exists if you want full control over your ecosystem, but there is also serverless-bundle that gives you a set of reasonable defaults on webpack 4 out of the box. We opted into this option to get us started quickly.

One of the most important aspects of serverless development is keeping an eye on your bundle sizes and to reduce cold start times on Lambda. Keeping this in mind, the template utilizes serverless-esbuild and serverless-analyze-bundle-plugin to provide function analysis out-of-the-box. I opted for serverless-esbuild over serverless-bundle for a few reasons:

We use the package.json at the project root to install the dependencies that will be shared across all the services. For example, if you are using serverless-bundle to optimally package the Lambda functions, or using the serverless-plugin-warmup to reduce cold starts, they should be installed at the root level. It doesn’t make sense to install them in each and every single service.