This is massive for AWS Lambda (and we've waited a long time for this). We can now use async/await without transpiling our code. Thereby making it more readable.
We should hopefully see improved performance and startup times.
async/await is still slower in 8.10 than promises though, isn't it?
Also, I'd be interested to find out why this is so massive? We've been waiting a long time for this, and I get that Lambda is complex with lambda@edge and all that, but how much tweaking does AWS do to the node runtime before they can deploy this?
Node 8 has been out for 10 months, and it's been LTS for half a year - or did they simply wait for it to be stable enough to run, or anything specific in 8.10?
In a world where cold starts have a substantial impact on performance, the runtime cost of async/await is negligible. If your function takes even a second longer to execute because of await use, I'd be incredibly surprised.
Maybe massive was an exaggeration. Before node 8.10, AWS Lambda used 6.10 which was frustrating. If you used async/await so you would have to transpile your code or upload a node binary. So really it's more convenient.
Not sure why it takes 10 months to move to the new runtime.
On the whole I feel like the JS/TS eco-system is getting better and better. Especially since browsers and runtimes are converging towards ES6/7 :)
It was said back in a blog post for the introduction of aws batch, but when will we be able to also use lambda functions in a batch environment? (The job isn’t too complex, it just needs to run longer than 5 minutes (an hour or two))
This update was a very long time coming, so I'm grateful that it finally happened.
Still, it's disappointing that they couldn't change course (ever so slightly!) to accommodate the 8.11.0 security update from a week ago: https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v8.11.0/
Really hope they'll be keeping up-to-date with incremental Node 8 releases, now that they've (almost) caught up with the times.
New LTS versions of node have been released in September/October for the last two years and AWS Lambda has added support for them around April/May for the last two years.
I wonder if they purposefully wait for x.10 update (6.10 and 8.10) or it has something to do with internal management of projects.
I'm pretty deep into this with https://checklyhq.com so not really an "ad hoc" user. Some open concerns for "real" production use are still:
- cost: memory heavy (1,5Gb) lambda get costly quickly
- stability: No reason to assume this is bad, but running a Chromium browser in Docker is/was pretty tricky
- startuptime: Booting Chrome might be a time suck
Coupling this with SQS triggers for Lambda might make spinning up VM's obsolete for my business.