[client-lambda] Cannot destructure property 'response' of '(intermediate value)' as it is undefined

[jlowcs]

Checkboxes for prior research

• I've gone through Developer Guide and API reference
• I've checked AWS Forums and StackOverflow.
• I've searched for previous similar issues and didn't find any solution.

Describe the bug

Cannot destructure property 'response' of '(intermediate value)' as it is undefined is reported to Sentry pretty regularly when using @aws-sdk/client-lambda.

Regression Issue

• Select this option if this issue appears to be a regression.

SDK version number

@aws-sdk/client-lambda@3.787.0

Which JavaScript Runtime is this issue in?

Node.js

Details of the browser/Node.js/ReactNative version

node v22.11.0

Reproduction Steps

Cannot reproduce easily.

We're calling lambda.invoke the following way:

import { Lambda } from '@aws-sdk/client-lambda';
import { NodeHttpHandler } from '@smithy/node-http-handler';

const lambda = new Lambda({
  region: 'us-west-2',
  apiVersion: '2015-03-31',
  requestHandler: new NodeHttpHandler({
    connectionTimeout: 1000,
    socketTimeout: 1000,
  }),
});

// ...

const response = await lambda.invoke({
  FunctionName: longlinksStoreLambdaFunctionName,
  InvocationType: 'RequestResponse',
  LogType: 'None',
  Payload: JSON.stringify({
    body: JSON.stringify({
      url,
      hashLength,
    }),
  }),
});

I just noticed that our apiVersion value is quite old btw.

Observed Behavior

The following error is being reported to Sentry:

Note that this doesn't happen every time, so it "feels" like a race condition.

Expected Behavior

No error

Possible Solution

No response

Additional Information/Context

See also smithy-lang/smithy-typescript#1558

[kuhe]

Information for SDK maintainers:

The deserializerMiddleware is the last middleware in most stacks, including the default stack of the Lambda client.

To confirm, run the following code to make the client log the middleware stack:

const client = new Lambda(...);
client.middlewareStack.identifyOnResolve(true);

await client.invoke(...);

Output will resemble:

[
  'loggerMiddleware - initialize',
  'httpAuthSchemeMiddleware - serialize',
  'endpointV2Middleware - serialize',
  'serializerMiddleware - serialize',
  'contentLengthMiddleware - build',
  'getUserAgentMiddleware - build',
  'hostHeaderMiddleware - build',
  'recursionDetectionMiddleware - build',
  'retryMiddleware - finalizeRequest',
  'httpSigningMiddleware (a.k.a. apiKeyMiddleware,tokenMiddleware,awsAuthMiddleware) - finalizeRequest',
  'deserializerMiddleware - deserialize'
]

Once the deserializerMiddleware is confirmed to be the final middleware, the only downstream invocation is the requestHandler.handle() async method. In Node.js this is the NodeHttpHandler.

Try to find a condition where the handle method returns an undefined value without throwing, since that seems like the only way to cause this issue.

[jlowcs]

My output:

[
  'loggerMiddleware - initialize',
  'httpAuthSchemeMiddleware - serialize',
  'endpointV2Middleware - serialize',
  'serializerMiddleware - serialize',
  'contentLengthMiddleware - build',
  'getUserAgentMiddleware - build',
  'hostHeaderMiddleware - build',
  'recursionDetectionMiddleware - build',
  'retryMiddleware - finalizeRequest',
  'httpSigningMiddleware (a.k.a. apiKeyMiddleware,tokenMiddleware,awsAuthMiddleware) - finalizeRequest',
  'deserializerMiddleware - deserialize'
]

Try to find a condition where the handle method returns an undefined value without throwing, since that seems like the only way to cause this issue.

Where could I search for that since NodeHttpHandler is itself coming from a library?

[jlowcs]

Looking at NodeHttpHandler's code, it seems to always be returning a promise: