AWS Finally Fixed Some Little Things

In the last month, AWS has fixed 3 long standing annoyances of mine.

1. SQS now has native concurrency limiting when calling a Lambda. Previously, you had to rely on setting the limit at the Lambda level, which caused errors and retries by SQS — potentially leading to spurious DLQ (dead letter queue) events and/or never-processed messages.
2. CloudWatch logs now supports EMF (embedded metric format) without setting special headers or using special APIs. In particular, Fargate should work out of the box now, just like Lambda does. EMF is an easy and inexpensive way to add metrics to your services.
3. CloudFormation map/FindInMap doesn’t suck so much — you can now have a default value. It’s good to see syntax improvements in CloudFormation, because it’s a quick and simple tool compared to CDK. Sometimes a project just needs a paring knife (CloudFormation), not a chef’s knife (CDK).

Now, all they need to do is add VPC support to CloudShell!