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Long answer: it's complicated (not complex). Your DynamoDB table is just one API call away, but you need to put in some authentication and authorization, which is not trivial. Although Vercel provides documentation on how to integrate with AWS services directly, I don't think that's a solid solution. Basically, this approach is suggesting that you to set up your AWS user's secret access key as an environment variable, so you can access them later from your function. Unfortunately, that's not a security best practice as many users express in this GitHub discussion. User secrets rotate, and I would never create a DynamoDB policy declaring an IAM user as a principal. Instead, you use IAM roles for that. However, you can't use the IAM Role assigned to Vercel's lambda function and declare it as the principal in your AWS DynamoDB policy ... because that role is managed by Vercel.
Edge Functions (in beta) are very similar to Serverless Functions except that they are deployed at the edge with CloudFlare Workers. I believe these functions can only be programmed in Javascript and are executed by the powerful V8 runtime. Additionally, with Edge Functions, you need to write a small piece of middleware that is executed before the request is processed and is very useful for use cases such as authentication, redirects, or A/B testing.
What are the alternatives? Well, at the end of the day, my DynamoDB scenario above is nothing but an HTTP API call encapsulated by an SDK function. So basically, I would use Amazon Cognito and OAuth 2.0 credential flows to control access to my DynamoDB tables from my Vercel Serverless Function based on the user’s group membership. I am pretty sure that this is similar to what other public DBaaS solution like Supabase do.
I am ranting here, but that is precisely Darklang's mission. I wouldn't go as far as Darklang with Vercel, and I am especially skeptical about the idea of creating its own kind-of-visual programming language. Still, I like the idea of instant deployments as you code, transparently. I mean, with an optimized DPS workflow like Vercel's, why do we need to build on localhost anyway? I guess we are not just prepared for that. To me, one of the main problems of Darklang is that it is too forward-thinking, too advanced for our time, and it does not resolve any of the problems developers have nowadays. In other words, it didn't consider our zeitgeist. It is not meeting their customers (developers) where they are.