TL;DR: The aws-serverless-express open source project has graduated from AWS Labs and is now being actively supported and sponsored by Vendia!
About Serverless Express
Back in 2016, I was General Manager of two up-and-coming AWS Services: AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway. APIs were already well understood by our customer base, but selling Lambda was initially a little more difficult – not only was the idea of a fully managed, pay-by-the-call function hosting service a novelty among public cloud providers, it was also very different from existing developer practices. Case in point: Express-based web services.
Lambda launched with support for Node.js, which helped a lot of customers start using it easily, given their existing familiarity with JavaScript. But for many customers, just having a familiar language wasn’t enough — they were also looking for familiar frameworks, such as Express, on which to build their Lambda-based web applications.
After hearing this feedback from many customers, we realized we needed to “meet customers where they were” by bringing Serverless solutions to existing frameworks….and thus the Serverless Express GitHub project was born!
Over the course of the last four years many developers have adopted Serverless solutions, including Serverless Express, to help accelerate development and gain Serverless benefits like lower operational overhead, automatic per-request scaling, built-in fault tolerance, and pay-per-call pricing. Today, the aws-serverless-express NPM package gets over 1.3M downloads per month, and its GitHub repository has over 3.7K stars.
Meet Brett Andrews, original author of the Serverless Express project
The original author of the Serverless Express project, Brett Andrews, joined Vendia recently, and we realized we can do even more in our mission to help customers share code and data effectively by giving back to the open source community. How so? By helping the Serverless Express project “graduate” from its initial location in AWS Labs to a permanent place in Vendia’s repository.
As the original project sponsor, and with the guidance of the project’s original author, AWS trusted us to being thoughtful and proactive stewards of this project. We will continue meeting with AWS monthly to gather customer feedback, and be briefed on upcoming AWS Serverless releases, so that we may be a launch partner and provide day 1 support in Serverless Express.
Migration instructions
If you’re an existing Serverless Express user, you don’t need to take any immediate action. For convenience we’ve published aws-serverless-express v3.4.0 that takes a direct dependency on the new official package @vendia/serverless-express@^3.4.0.
This means that by simply upgrading to [email protected], you’ll get all downstream patches and features without needing to update your code. Alternatively, you can run the following command to take a direct dependency on the new official package
npm uninstall aws-serverless-express && npm install @vendia/serverless-express
After updating the deps, update your code accordingly — e.g., change your imports.
- require('aws-serverless-express')
+ require('@vendia/serverless-express')
If you’re new to Serverless Express and wondering how to get started, you can deploy a Serverless REST API to AWS in under 5 minutes by following the Serverless Express Basic Starter on GitHub.
Benefits of Vendia Share and Serverless Express
Get these benefits:
- Supports event sources other than API Gateway such as ALB, Lambda Edge, HTTP API, and makes it easy to provide your own custom event source mapping for other services that are integrated with Lambda
- Has improved logging and debugging support
- Is more extensible and simpler to use with an improved developer experience
- Uses Promise resolution by default
- Is upgraded to Node.js 10 (compatible with Node.js 12+)
- Makes it easier to work with Custom Domain Names
- Has improved documentation and examples
- Supports Multiple header values
What’s in it for Vendia?
We feel a strong connection to helping the Serverless community succeed. Technologies like Lambda, managed API and database services, and other Serverless offerings power Vendia’s implementations and help us deliver scalable, low-cost code and data sharing solutions for our customers. We also continue to believe strongly in the mission of Serverless Express: To give developers a simple, scalable platform that meets them where they are, and then helps them gain the best of what the cloud has to offer…without unnecessary retraining, rewriting, or porting exercises.
We’re also excited to find ways to bring Vendia Share — the next generation Serverless platform — and Serverless Express users closer together with easy ways to use both platforms in combination.
To all the existing (and future) Serverless Express users, we look forward to making your experience even better. To all the project contributors, we look forward to being great partners, building on your existing contributions and successes in this project. And to AWS, a huge thank You for believing in this idea back when it felt risky and uncertain, and thank you some more for allowing it to leave the nest now that it’s grown.
Want to join Vendia’s team of developers? Explore our current openings, and sign up for the free Vendia Share app to see what it’s all about.