At this point AWS has gotten so complex that one has to jump through a dozen hoops to get the simplest of things done.

To scale up our reporting I thought it’s a good idea to offload report generation to a lambda function. Read from MySQL, dump into S3 and mail a link to that S3 file, make the link expire after couple of hours. Reasonably simple enough. But by God was it painful!! IAM is a rabbit hole, now later VPC restrictions on top and couple that with terribly organized document it makes no fun at all.

I get the need for all those layers of security but without well organized document everyone has to go through the ordeal. What we need now is plethora of how-tos for these common architectural patterns.