My Perfect AWS Console

Yeah that's literally it. I love AWS and use a decent portion of their offerings, but could really honestly get by with 2 of the OG AWS features, and one relative newcomer. ## AWS S3 The performance these days is absolutely top-notch (without even going down the [Directory Buckets](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/directory-buckets-overview.html) route). It's cheap enough that with a well-designed path structure, you can put just-about any workflow that can be represented with JSON into it. As in, you probably don't need [Step Functions](https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/). ## AWS Lambda I can't remember the last time I've needed a server that hangs around all the time, whether for work or side-gigs. Lambdas just fit _so well_ with modern request-response patterns that it's difficult to justify anything else. Add some [Provisioned Concurrency](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/operatorguide/provisioned-scaling.html) if you really need nice warm caches and connections, but you still get the super-fast deployment and observability of functions-in-the-cloud. And you're not limited to 30-second execution time any more either (it's currently [up to 15 minutes](https://blog.awsfundamentals.com/lambda-limitations)), so you can wait for those slow 3rd-party APIs. *Protip:* The Lambda Test Console allows you to store (and share!) test JSON payloads for each lambda. This can be a superb way to perform ad-hoc jobs, or re-process things that didn't quite work right the first time. Add a `dryRun?: boolean` option to the input shape and pass it though your lambda code to check things before opening the taps. ## AWS AppSync Sure the web console is a little clunky and bug-ridden (it won't reauthenticate its own IAM session so your queries will eventually just ... die) but if you've got a GraphQL interface deep inside some WAF-protected VPN, this is a great way to give it a poke.