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Comment by bcjordan | Hacker News Reader

AWS Lambda[0] and GCP Functions[1] both say they support only up to Node 16 today. Hopefully they'll get new versions shipped with enough lead time for customers to upgrade ahead of the deprecation. (There are things like Cloud Run to bring your own container that could be used sooner)

[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-nodejs.h...

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/concepts/nodejs-runt...

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I don’t know the AWS ecosystem but in the meantime on GCP at least just use Cloud Run rather than Cloud Functions and keep whatever run time you want and pick up a bunch of other benefits in the process.

Their latest version of Cloud Functions is actually using Cloud Run under the hood already.

Cloud Run introduces a heap of other considerations at the enterprise level - container building and repository management which may not be managed by your team etc.

Cloud Functions/Lambda are very nice in a company where you don't necessarily have access to making your own AMI, or container image etc.

At least that's what we used them for at my old job. Still had to deal with some level of corporate tech indirection (E.G. We couldn't make the API gateway however we wanted, our account had no access to route53 etc.), but much less than with containers. It was just a quicker way to get code running.

I should have mentioned this in the original post but the missing piece of the puzzle to help close that gap is Buildpacks https://buildpacks.io/ which gets you out of the path of having to think about creating containers and again AFAIK is what Cloud Functions is using under the hood.

This is largely because Node 16 is the current LTS.

Node 16 graduated to LTS on 20 Apr 2021. Lambda added support for Node 16 just last month, basically 13 months after.

I hope they add Node 18 sooner than that.

Node 18 will be active LTS in October this year. So they will have 11 month of buffer

AWS have already openly admitted that they were slow bringing Node 16 support and plan to be quicker next time round.

> We recognize that customers have been waiting for some time for this runtime release. We hear your feedback and plan to release the next Node.js runtime version in a timelier manner.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/node-js-16-x-runtime-no...

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