aws – The Occasional Masthead

No more AWS Access Keys?

It’s too common these days that I struggle to find solid stretches of time to think about things, so I tend to make progress on tech chores while I’m on holiday. This is an example…

Calistemon flower in Amsterdam Botanic Garden, photo by author.

One of the things that has been on my mind is to follow AWS best practices, and try to eliminate the use of IAM access key and secret access key pairs from my laptop. It’s a good rule of thumb from AWS, but it turns out to be rather frustratingly poorly explained how you can go about it. So, here’s what I worked out for my purposes.

Two big caveats: this solution was for my own personal use cases, and may not match yours. Also, it’s quite Mac-centric, because that’s where I work. Your mileage may vary.

AWS MSK + Glue – Part One

Antique cannon covered in snow — (Photo by Author)

Over December 2022 I got it into my head that I wanted my teams to skill up on the combination of Kafka and a Schema Register. There’s a ton of resources on introducing the use of Kafka, and some resources on using a Schema Registry, but I was not satisfied that there were any consolidated quick-starts that experienced engineers could use as templates for building real production solutions.

Give me a shell and a place to stand…

I was thinking yesterday “hmm, I seem to have more AWS KMS keys than I’m actually using”. But how to find them when they are scattered across regions?

AWS Cli to the rescue. A trivial bash script, and voila a list of KMS Key ARNs across my entire account:

#!/bin/bash
PROF=adm_rhook_cli
for REGION in $(aws --profile $PROF ec2 describe-regions | jq -r '.Regions[].RegionName')
do
    aws --profile $PROF --region $REGION kms list-keys | jq '.Keys[].KeyArn'
done

The only complicated part was remembering how to use jq to parse JSON. The syntax for that never seems to stick in my head.

If you’re not in the habit of writing tiny shell scripts for automation — get the habit. The closer you get to the machine, the more power you have. Also — the lingua franca of Linux is ASCII text (ok, I guess technically UTF-8 now?) and getting comfortable piping results from one tool into another with appropriate text manipulation is a super power.