Great but Underrated AWS Services

So, what is apparently a white guy, writes an article about AWS, and at the top of that article is a picture of an attractive woman of color, holding a laptop and leaning against a glass window showing a few racks of computers.

Something seems a little off about that article, right off the bat.

The services themselves are CloudFormation, Trusted Advisor, Cognito, and X-Ray. I can’t speak much for Cognito, but I have a bit of experience with the others.

I agree that they’re good, but CloudFormation has serious scaling issues. Once you’re beyond about 50kb in size, you can’t validate your CloudFormation templates locally anymore. And YAML is not a proper programming language. Trying to shoe-horn a programming language into YAML is always going to be a fraught exercise. I’m definitely coming around to the opinion that a real programming language plus CDK is a better solution.

X-Ray is a start, but doesn’t begin to approach what you can do with any other library I know of for doing performance analysis. The one and only advantage it has is that it’s from AWS, as opposed to New Relic or some other company.

Trusted Advisor is truly great, at least insofar as it goes. It really can help you clean up the low hanging fruit for reducing your costs or improving your security. But it only goes so far. And some of the recommendations might make sense in certain circumstances, but you need to know enough about your systems to know when the recommendations are not appropriate. After all, you might really want to have port 443 open to the public, maybe for a public web service, for example.

Cognito pools are an important part of API Gateway implementations, but I don’t know that I would call them great or under rated. I think anyone who does anything with API Gateway is going to know how useful they are — or are not.

Cognito?