This will be the first in a series of posts describing Tweets I’ve sent with the hashtag #awswishlist. Tweets to this #awswishlist hashtag come from anyone who uses AWS and is frustrated with the AWS user experience in some way. These Tweets are often responded to by AWS Support staff on Twitter, indicating they’ll be passing the feedback on to the team responsible for the AWS service. But in my tenure using AWS, I’ve only personally seen one wishlist item get resolved within a reasonable time frame.

Recently I moved my personal blog from GitHub Pages to AWS Amplify. While it was fairly easy to setup the Amplify project and CI/CD pieces, the DNS configuration for Custom Domains was less straightforward. The following observations are what I found to be less than ideal while using Amplify for the first time.

AWS Amplify DNS instructions

One problem that I found with AWS Amplify, which was surprising for someone who is familiar with Route53 and DNS, is that the suggested instructions on the Amplify Domain Management page are somewhat cryptic. Amplify is a fairly new AWS service, so I’ll give them some lattitude, but this UI/UX needs to be improved.

Discourse is used for a number of purposes, but their forum software is quite popular. I’ve been looking at how to us the Discourse API to automate creating posts. This blog post describes how to setup a local Discourse instance and perform API calls against it.

I’ve been attempting to learn more about Lambda@Edge and how to use functions at the AWS edge locations, so I wrote up this demo. It isn’t performing a very realistic operation, but it did allow me to understand the Lambda@Edge and Cloudfront cache relationship (aka “event model”) and how to intercept CDN cache requests and modify responses in a Lambda function.

Security minded users often run Docker to create an additional sandbox around an untrusted application running on their system. Web Browsers are among the most untrusted applications we run today. Here’s how to setup the Brave Browser to run in Docker.

Inlets is a fairly new project that allows you to setup reverse proxy, websocket tunnels, or other endpoints to the public internet, it is similar to ngrok. The video overview from Alex Ellis shows how simple it makes setting up the environment.