📊Tracking: upgrade to Node 20

[evgenyka]

Overview (updated 1/30/25)

Node 18, which is currently in its Active LTS phase, is slated to reach its End of Life on 2025-04-30, as indicated on https://nodejs.dev/en/about/releases/.
Our aim is to provide CDK users with sufficient preparation time to update their CDK code to the latest LTS Node version (Node 20) before it becomes unsupported for deployed resources such as Lambda and Custom Resources.

Node 20 and 22 are available in CDK but are not the default for Lambda as not every region yet supports them, however it is available in Commercial, China and Gov Cloud regions. We recommend you use an explicit Node version such as NODEJS_22_X (rather than NODEJS_LATEST). The default NODEJS_LATEST will be updated once all regions support Node 20 (or 22).

For custom constructs the regional defaults for custom constructs in Commercial are now Node 20. The regional defaults for custom constructs in China and Gov Cloud regions have been updated to Node 20 and will be in the next release (expected 2/5/25)

Link to the service’s CDK Construct Library API reference page.

N/A

Maturity: CloudFormation Resources Only

Stable

Implementation

TBD

Issue list

• aws-cdk-lib: NODEJS_LATEST still points to nodejs18.x  #28125
• [ ]

[estrudels]

Update around preview of AWS Lambda (Node 20 Support)

• Node v20 Released aws-lambda-base-images#91 (comment)
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2023/ug/minimal-container.html

[haata]

Any progress? Slated completion is less than 2 weeks away.

[QuantumNeuralCoder]

There are 2 issues in consideration here.

1. CDK Custom resources using NodeJs as managed runtime for Lambda function. Customers cannot change or override the nodejs version for these custom resources. To mitigate this CDK released a region-awareness feature in v2.146.0 on 6/13. Due to this feature, the custom resources will use the lambda managed runtime available in your region. You should be able to see nodejs20 being used in commercial regions.

• implement node runtime region awareness for cdk vended custom resources (#30108) (69c5dde)

2. Variable nodejs_latest in (aws-cdk-lib/aws-lambda/lib/runtime.js). Customers can use the nodejs version of their choice instead of depending on this variable. This will be upgraded as we work on resolving a lambda runtime support dependency. Lambda runtime support timelines for the nodejs versions can be found in this doc

[SimonCMoore]

Just to clarify further on previous, Node 20 and 22 are available in CDK but are not the default as not every region yet supports them.

e.g. Node 20 and 22 are supported for Lambda https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/blob/main/packages/aws-cdk-lib/aws-lambda/lib/runtime.ts#L113 but not the default https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/blob/main/packages/aws-cdk-lib/aws-lambda/lib/runtime.ts#L119

For custom constructs this PR was just merged to update defaults for custom constructs for a few more regions which now have Node 20 and will be in the next release. #33112