Alternative lambda runtimes

[jpbourgeon]

In the end, itty-aws will remove the need for any AWS SDK.

Would it bring faster cold starts and execution speed to run serverless functions on community node.js runtimes without any pre-bundled AWS SDK ?

We could distribute community runtimes for node.js and bun.sh.

For node.js I have a simple idea. Each time an official node.js runtime is released, we remove the AWS SDK from it with a Github Action and publish it in our own public container repo.

Here are the basic steps:

1. Create a Dockerfile to define our custom runtime from a base node.js runtime. For example, the following Dockerfile extends the Node.js 18.x runtime[[]] and removes the AWS SDK:

FROM amazon/aws-lambda-nodejs:18

# Remove the AWS SDK  
RUN npm rm -g @aws-sdk/*  

2. Build the docker image
3. push the image to a container registry like AWS ECR or Docker Hub.