I recently had the opportunity to explore building custom CloudFormation resource types as a mechanism to support a stream-aligned team. It was intriguing to play with this new-to-me tool and see how it could reduce complexity for the team.

I had an AWS STS AssumeRole problem today when I was working with the AWS SDK; digging in it turned out the problem was that AssumeRole was not actually being invoked. Poking around I was unsurprised to find that @ben11kehoe had already clearly stated the problem and GitHub user petitout had example Go code with the right way to do it (link).

Recently one of the teams I work with had a fun time (note: it was not fun in the moment) with Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), dead-letter queues (DLQs), and AWS Key Management Service (KMS). I thought I’d share because we learned something pretty important.

I had the amazing opportunity to co-present a session at AWS re:Inforce 2022. My co-presenter was Suresh Sridharan, a product manager on the Amazon Cognito team. Suresh talked about a variety of options that Cognito customers have for managing multi-tenant solutions, and I talked about the particular choices that our team has made and what took us down this path. For the full details, check out the slides and the recording.

I read a great post about protecting Amazon Cognito with an Amazon CloudFront proxy and wondered if using an Amazon API Gateway proxy instead would work better. It really really did. Being able to use the full power of Lambda was fantastic, and the performance was improved significantly. I got in touch with the author of the original post and he was generous enough to offer a collaboration on a follow-up post on the AWS architecture blog.

I think we struggle to make lasting changes when our incentives are not aligned with the change we want to see. What if there were a simple way to nudge ourselves towards success?

Sometimes Lambda doesn’t cut it when you’re trying to create a custom resource.

The other day I got halfway through writing a very irate support ticket to AWS, stopped to do some fact checking, and learned something deeply annoying.

Recently someone asked me why I prefer using Go to build services instead of Python.

It struck me as an odd question, mostly because the way it was phrased and how I skimmed it made me think they were asking why I recommended using Python to build services, which is something I have never done. Once we got past my misunderstanding and I had apologized for not reading carefully, I took a few minutes to think about it.

I was curious what would happen with a time.Ticker running in an AWS Lambda function.

It was pretty obvious that the ticker wouldn’t tick while the container was hibernating, but what about when it woke up? Would a bunch of ticks happen if the container had been hibernating for a long time? Would you get a tick at all?