Improve API call latency

[jpbourgeon]

I suggest using a better HTTP library than node-fetch. undici is the package that powers the fetch function in node.js >= 18.0. It has a reputation for being faster than node-fetch and is supported from node.js >= 14.0. In particular, it supports connexion pooling and pipelining.

I looked into undici because I was receiving errors in node-fetch and i discovered that undici is what drives node-fetch.

node-fetch references no dependency to undici in its package.json. AFAIK undici powers the fetch feature of node.js >= 18.x but is not related to node-fetch. Did you confused node-fetch with node.js?

Problem with undici would be that it ties us to node? Would it also work in browser, deno, bun, cloudflare?

If we do it well, we wouldn't be tied to node.js. To me being able to use itty-aws in other runtime context is tied to our architecturing choices. This is why I suggest adopting an adapter/middleware architecture in another discussion. We could then have alternative implementation of common interfaces from any environment and inject any flavour of external dependency needed to make it work.

Have we tried using a custom HTTP agent?

This benchmark compares node-fetch to undici, and although it is a bit old, it shows that undici fetch outperforms node-fetch even with a custom HTTP agent. Furthermore, there are alternatives to fetch in the undici API that need to be explored, since they are way faster than their own fetch method (see their internal benchmark): stream, dispatch, request or pipeline.