标签：#AWS

The Hidden Cost of Manual IAM Review Most teams don't track how long they spend reviewing IAM policies. When I started measuring it on my own team, the numbers were worse than I expected. A thorough manual review of one IAM policy takes 10 to 15 minutes. Not a quick scan. A real review: read every statement, trace every cross-account trust, verify every condition key, check for privilege escalation paths, confirm the resource ARNs match what you think they should. At 4 engineers touching IAM once a week, that's 4 hours a month. 48 hours a year of senior engineers reading JSON documents. And that's the optimistic case. Add a security incident. Add an audit. Add the emergency Friday-afternoon policy change that needs review before deploy. The real number is higher. What manual review misses The problem isn't just the time. It's that humans are bad at repetitive structured-data review, especially under time pressure. Here are the things I've seen slip through manual IAM reviews on production systems: iam:PassRole with no condition. This is the big one. PassRole lets a principal pass a role to a service — and if there's no iam:PassedToService condition, that role can be passed to any service that accepts roles. Including services the attacker controls. The reviewer saw the action, mentally categorized it as "role stuff," and moved on. It was statement 47 of 52 — the reviewer had already been reading policies for 40 minutes. Wildcard resource with sensitive actions. s3:* on Resource: "*" is obvious. s3:GetObject on "arn:aws:s3:::*-backup/*" with a wildcard in the bucket name — that's subtle. The reviewer reads it as "restricted to backup buckets" and moves on. But the wildcard means any bucket ending in -backup , including ones in other accounts if cross-account access is configured. Missing aws:SourceArn on Lambda invocation permissions. When you grant another service permission to invoke your Lambda function, you need aws:SourceArn to prevent the confused deputy

Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and other publishers allege that Google trained its AI on copyrighted works without the necessary permissions.

You know the drill for adding an MCP server to a project: dig the exact command string out of the docs, hand-write a .mcp.json with an absolute path you'll typo once, restart the editor, and discover no tools showed up because the server expected a config file you haven't created yet. Plenty of MCP servers lose their would-be users somewhere inside that loop. Infrawise collapses the whole loop into one command. It's an open-source tool ( npm ) that statically analyzes your codebase, AWS infrastructure, and database schemas, then exposes that context to AI coding assistants over MCP — so Claude Code knows your actual partition keys, GSIs, and indexes instead of guessing from source files. This post is about the part that usually kills tools like this before they deliver any value: setup. Section 1: One command, four steps npm install -g infrawise # or skip install and use npx cd your-project infrawise start --claude start does four things, in order: 1. Probes your environment. If there's no infrawise.yaml in the project, it generates one. It reads AWS_PROFILE if set; otherwise it looks at your configured AWS profiles — one profile means zero questions, several means one prompt asking which to use. That's the entire interview. (If you want the full guided wizard instead, infrawise start --interactive runs it.) 2. Runs the analysis. It scans your AWS services, database schemas, and codebase, builds a graph of services, tables, indexes, and query patterns, and runs rule-based analyzers over it. No LLM is involved in this step — extraction and analysis are deterministic, so the same infrastructure always produces the same graph. 3. Writes .mcp.json to your project root. This is the file you'd otherwise write by hand: { "mcpServers" : { "infrawise" : { "command" : "infrawise" , "args" : [ "serve" , "--stdio" , "--config" , "/absolute/path/to/infrawise.yaml" ] } } } 4. Opens Claude Code. Claude Code reads .mcp.json automatically and starts the session with all 21 infrawise

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian . Opposition to AI data centers has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that—surprisingly—doesn’t fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these data centers bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on data centers obscures the larger impacts of AI on people’s lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence...

When a series of regional outages forced a rethink of a multi-region AWS API, the team discovered that an obstacle to global failover was hiding in plain sight: a pre-flight discovery call baked into every client session years earlier as the only available option. This article describes what it took to remove it, and what the rollout actually cost. By Suresh Gururajan

AWS released an official Agent Toolkit that plugs Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor directly into your AWS account through a single MCP server. Instead of wiring up IAM roles and endpoints by hand, you install one plugin and the agent can search AWS docs, run sandboxed Python, and follow curated cloud skills with full CloudTrail audit logging. What the AWS Agent Toolkit Actually Is The Agent Toolkit for AWS is an open-source project (published on GitHub at aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws ) that bundles two things: The AWS MCP Server — a managed server that gives agents access to AWS through the Model Context Protocol. Agents can search AWS documentation and pull service information without authentication. To actually execute AWS API calls, run Python in a sandboxed environment, or follow curated skills, the agent authenticates through your existing IAM credentials. Agent plugins — single-install packages that bundle the MCP server configuration and a curated set of agent skills, so you don't configure endpoints and install skills one by one. The point is consolidation. One endpoint, IAM-based access controls, CloudWatch metrics, and CloudTrail logging of every API call for audit visibility. Which Agents It Supports Per AWS's own documentation, plugins ship for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor . Kiro connects to the AWS MCP Server directly without needing a plugin, and any MCP-capable agent can point at the server manually. The install flow is refreshingly short for Claude Code: /plugin install aws-core@claude-plugins-official /reload-plugins The aws-core plugin is the recommended default — it bundles the MCP server config and skills covering service selection, infrastructure as code (CDK and CloudFormation), serverless, containers, storage, observability, billing, SDK usage, and deployment. A second plugin, aws-agents , provides additional agent-oriented capabilities. Why This Matters for Coding-Agent Users Until now, getting an agent to safely touch your cloud account meant h

Every developer building on AWS eventually runs into the same frustrations: waiting for deployments just to verify a small change, needing an internet connection for local development, watching cloud costs grow during testing, and discovering issues in CI that could have been caught earlier. That's exactly why we built LocalEmu. LocalEmu is an open-source AWS emulator that lets you build and test against AWS APIs entirely on your own machine. It supports 132 AWS services and works with the tools you already use every day—AWS CLI, boto3, Terraform, AWS CDK, and Pulumi. Instead of changing your workflow, you simply point your tools to localhost:4566 and continue developing. Unlike many local emulators that only mock API responses, LocalEmu focuses on realistic behavior where it matters most. Lambda functions execute using the official AWS runtime images. EC2 instances run as real containers connected through a virtual network with enforced security groups. RDS uses real PostgreSQL and MySQL engines, and optional IAM policy enforcement allows you to validate authorization rules before deploying to AWS. Getting started takes only a couple of commands: pip install localemu [runtime] localemu start Once running, you can use the included awsemu CLI or simply point your existing AWS CLI, boto3, Terraform, CDK, or Pulumi configuration to localemu. No new SDKs or complex setup are required. LocalEmu also includes a built-in dashboard that launches automatically. It provides a live overview of running services, resource exploration, an S3 object browser, a DynamoDB viewer, CloudTrail event history, and a real-time activity feed so you can inspect what's happening inside your local cloud environment. The biggest advantage is speed. You can iterate in seconds instead of minutes, experiment freely, reset your environment whenever you want, and develop without an AWS account, credentials, or cloud costs for local testing. We're actively improving LocalEmu and would love feedback f

Instagram creators love engagement. Every comment is an opportunity to start a conversation, share a product, deliver a resource, or convert a viewer into a customer. The problem is that manually replying to hundreds or thousands of comments doesn't scale. At Vyral , we set out to build an Instagram AutoDM platform capable of serving thousands of creators while handling bursts of traffic generated by viral Reels. Instead of building a traditional chatbot, we designed an event driven system powered by Instagram webhooks, AWS services, and asynchronous processing. This article walks through the architecture, the engineering challenges we encountered, and the lessons we learned while designing a system that can process large spikes of comment events reliably. The Problem Imagine a creator with 2 million followers. A Reel starts trending. Within minutes: 10,000+ comments arrive Thousands of users comment the same keyword Instagram sends webhook events continuously Every eligible comment should trigger a personalized DM From an engineering perspective, this isn't a chatbot problem. It's an event processing problem. The system needs to answer questions like: Which comments qualify? Has this comment already been processed? What happens if Instagram sends the same webhook twice? What if the user deletes the comment? What if our service is temporarily unavailable? How do we avoid overwhelming downstream APIs? Those questions shaped the architecture far more than the messaging logic itself. Why We Chose Webhooks Instead of Polling Polling Instagram every few seconds would have introduced unnecessary latency and API usage for Vyral AutoDM . Instead, Instagram pushes events whenever something happens. The flow looks like this: Instagram │ ▼ Webhook Endpoint │ ▼ Event Validation │ ▼ Event Queue │ ▼ Workers │ ▼ Business Rules │ ▼ Send DM This architecture offers several benefits: Low latency Lower infrastructure cost Better scalability Natural decoupling between components Most i

Original Japanese article : Iceberg REST Catalogを直接叩いて、Glue Data CatalogとS3 Tablesの違いを理解する Introduction I'm Aki, an AWS Community Builder ( @jitepengin ). Most of the time, when working with Iceberg tables, we reach for PyIceberg or Spark. I'm no exception, and honestly there were parts of the PyIceberg configuration — rest.sigv4-enabled , rest.signing-name , warehouse — that I understood only vaguely. Iceberg defines a standard called the Iceberg REST Catalog Open API specification , and AWS implements it through two separate endpoints: The AWS Glue Iceberg REST endpoint ( https://glue.<region>.amazonaws.com/iceberg ) The Amazon S3 Tables Iceberg REST endpoint ( https://s3tables.<region>.amazonaws.com/iceberg ) If two implementations follow the same spec, sending the same requests to both and comparing the results should reveal what's actually different between them. In this article, I'll bypass clients like PyIceberg entirely and hit the REST API directly to explore the differences between the two endpoints. To state the conclusion up front: Even though both implement the same Iceberg REST Catalog specification, Glue is designed as an "entry point to multiple catalogs," while S3 Tables is designed as an "entry point to a single table bucket." That difference is visible just by looking at the URL paths. I previously wrote about the relationship between S3 Tables and Glue Data Catalog in another article — worth a read alongside this one: Does Amazon S3 Tables Replace AWS Glue Data Catalog? Understanding Their Relationship What Is the Iceberg REST Catalog? The Iceberg REST Catalog is a specification that standardizes Iceberg catalog operations as an HTTP API. It's published as an OpenAPI definition (YAML), and any catalog that conforms to it can be accessed the same way from clients such as PyIceberg, Spark, and Trino. The key points of the spec are: URL paths follow a pattern like GET /v1/{prefix}/namespaces , where {prefix} is a free-form segment Clients first call

Broadcom accuses Allstate of dodging VMware audits.

AWS has outlined how ProGlove, an industrial-wearables manufacturer, was able to scale its SaaS platform to run more than one million AWS Lambda functions spread across thousands of dedicated customer accounts. By Matt Foster

AWS Builder Center now offers free 8-hour sandbox environments for workshops. Here's how it works, who it's for, and how it compares to Free Tier, Skill Builder, and Educate.

AWS just announced free Sandbox environments which lets any AWS Builder Center user to provision...

After more than a decade of pushback, farmers and repair advocates have won access to equipment and services John Deere had long kept under its control.

Day 9 of the 30 Days of AWS Terraform series focuses on Terraform Lifecycle Rules — powerful controls that decide how Terraform creates, updates, replaces, and destroys resources. What Terraform LifeCycle meta arguments are Lifecycle meta arguments allow us to control how Terraform behaves when it creates, updates, or destroys resources. They help us: Avoid downtime Protect important resources Handle changes made outside Terraform Validate configurations before and after deployment Enforcing compliance Controlling replacement behavior Lifecycle rules allow us to override default behavior safely. Lifecycle rules are Terraform-native controls applied inside a resource block: lifecycle { ... } Lifecycle Rules Covered 1️⃣ create_before_destroy — Zero Downtime Updates Problem: Terraform destroys the old resource before creating the new one → downtime. Solution: lifecycle { create_before_destroy = true } Behavior: New resource is created first Old resource is destroyed only after Ensures zero downtime 2️⃣ prevent_destroy — Protect Critical Resources This setting prevents Terraform from deleting a resource. Example If Terraform tries to destroy this resource, it will fail with an error. This is useful for: Production databases State storage buckets Important data resources 3️⃣ ignore_changes — Allow External Modifications Problem: Terraform overwrites manual or automated external changes. Solution: lifecycle { ignore_changes = [desired_capacity] } Demo: Auto Scaling Group desired capacity modified manually in AWS Console terraform apply did not revert the change Behavior: Terraform ignores changes for specified attributes. ✅ Use for: Auto Scaling Groups Resources modified by external systems Ops-driven configurations 4️⃣ replace_triggered_by — Replace When Dependency Changes Problem: Changing a dependency doesn’t always recreate dependent resources. Solution: lifecycle { replace_triggered_by = [aws_security_group.main] } Behavior: When security group changes EC2 instance i

Exam Guide: Developer - Associate 🏗️ Domain 3: Deployment 📘 Task 4: Deploy Code By Using AWS Continuous Integration And Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Services This task tests your ability to build and manage CI/CD pipelines using AWS developer tools. You need to understand how CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline work together, how to write buildspec and appspec files, how deployment strategies differ, and how to configure automatic rollbacks. Deployment strategies for Lambda and EC2, SAM deployment preferences, and pipeline orchestration. 📘 Concepts AWS CI/CD Pipeline Overview The four AWS developer tools form a complete CI/CD pipeline: Service Role Input Output CodeCommit Source control Git push Source artifact CodeBuild Build and test Source artifact Build artifact CodeDeploy Deploy Build artifact Running application CodePipeline Orchestration Trigger (push, schedule) Coordinated pipeline execution How they connect: CodeCommit (source) → CodeBuild (build/test) → CodeDeploy (deploy) ↑ | └──────── CodePipeline (orchestrates all) ─────┘ 💡CodePipeline is the orchestrator. It doesn't build or deploy anything itself. It connects stages (source, build, test, deploy) and manages transitions between them. Each stage can use different providers (GitHub instead of CodeCommit, Jenkins instead of CodeBuild, etc.). CodeCommit Fundamentals Feature Details What It Is Managed Git repository hosted in AWS Authentication HTTPS (Git credentials or credential helper) or SSH (SSH keys) Encryption Encrypted at rest (AWS managed keys) and in transit (HTTPS/SSH) Triggers SNS notifications or Lambda functions on repository events Cross-account Use IAM roles with AssumeRole for cross-account access Branching Standard Git branching: main, develop, feature branches 💡CodeCommit supports triggers for push events that can invoke Lambda functions or send SNS notifications. This is different from CodePipeline's source stage: triggers are repository-level events, while CodePipeline po

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a major expansion of its AWS DevOps Agent, introducing new release management capabilities designed to assess code changes and autonomously test software before it reaches production. By Craig Risi

I optimized my architecture for the wrong model. I used to think black-box infrastructure was the right abstraction for AI-driven development. Vercel, Supabase, Cloudflare Workers — a sharp contract in front, a managed backend behind — felt like the obvious fit. The less an agent had to reason about, the fewer places it could get lost. Give it a clean interface, hide the messy backend, move fast. I still think that was right for the agents we had last year. I don't think it's right for the agents we're starting to use now. The shift is not that AWS got simpler. It didn't. Setup still takes longer, CI/CD takes more work to wire, and cost control has real limits. The shift is that agents got better at reading complexity — and once an agent can actually use a large structured context, the things I treated as overhead (resources, provider schemas, IAM policies, explicit queues, explicit alarms, explicit networks) become the highest-signal context I can hand it. To keep this concrete, I'm holding the tool constant. This is HCL/Terraform on AWS vs HCL/Terraform on Cloudflare — same language, same workflow, two providers. The inversion Agents are… Best served by… Context-poor (last year's loops) Black boxes — shrink the surface, hide the backend Context-rich (now) Inspectable systems — describe everything as code The one-line version: The better agents get at reading, the more valuable explicit infrastructure becomes. I didn't become more pro-AWS because AWS got easier. I became more pro-AWS because agents got better at reading it. Same Terraform, two providers The interesting comparison isn't AWS-elegance vs Cloudflare-elegance. It's how much of the infrastructure topology and operational contract an agent can reconstruct from the HCL plus the provider schema alone. Terraform × AWS Terraform × Cloudflare Provider maturity AWS provider is about as battle-tested as IaC gets; enormous public corpus of modules/examples v5 is a ground-up, OpenAPI-generated rewrite — improving

AI is coming for your cloud budget before it comes for your job. Everyone is talking about what AI will do to engineers. Nobody is talking about what AI services are doing to cloud bills right now. Every team is spinning up AI workloads. LLM endpoints; vector databases; GPU instances; embedding pipelines. All of them expensive. Most of them ungoverned. I have seen environments where AI service costs doubled in 30 days because nobody set a budget limit. No alerts. No guardrails. Just an invoice that surprised everyone at month end. This is the new cloud sprawl. But instead of forgotten EC2 instances it is uncontrolled AI API calls and model inference costs running 24/7. The same discipline that applies to cloud infrastructure applies here. Who is allowed to spin up AI services. What models are approved for use. How are API keys being managed. Are there rate limits in place. Is anyone reviewing the cost daily. AI governance in the cloud is not an AI problem. It is a cloud security and FinOps problem wearing an AI hat. The teams that win with AI are not the ones moving fastest. They are the ones who built guardrails before the bill arrived. Govern your AI workloads the same way you govern everything else in your cloud. Before the invoice does it for you.

Automation is the part of DevOps that actually earns the title. Day 6 was two of the most everyday automation tasks there are, and both had a trap sitting in plain sight. One Linux task, one AWS task. Schedule a recurring job with cron, and launch an EC2 instance from the AWS CLI. The tasks come from the KodeKloud Engineer platform if you want the same lab to work through. Cron: five fields, one rule that trips everyone Cron is the scheduler that has quietly run Linux automation for decades. You hand it a job and a schedule, and its daemon, crond, wakes up every minute to check whether anything is due. If that daemon is not running, nothing fires, so the first move is making sure it is installed and enabled. # Become root sudo su - # Install the cron daemon if it is missing yum install cronie -y # Enable it at boot, start it now, and confirm it is alive systemctl enable crond.service systemctl start crond.service systemctl status crond.service cronie is the package name on RHEL-family distros. enable makes the service survive a reboot, start brings it up right now, and status is how you confirm it is actually running instead of assuming it is. Now edit the crontab: # Edit the current user's crontab crontab -e # minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week command 0 2 * * * /path/to/script.sh # List what is currently scheduled crontab -l That line runs the script every day at 2am. The five fields, in order, are minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week: minute: 0 to 59 hour: 0 to 23 day of month: 1 to 31 month: 1 to 12 day of week: 0 to 7, where both 0 and 7 mean Sunday Here is the rule that quietly breaks schedules. When you set both the day-of-month field and the day-of-week field to something other than a star, cron treats them as OR, not AND. So 0 0 13 * 5 does not mean midnight on Friday the 13th. It means midnight on every 13th of the month, and also every Friday, whichever lands first. If you actually want the AND, you restrict one field in cron and che