Very nice article. I always think that the clue to exception use is in the name - for an exceptional situation that is not expected and there is no obvious path forward and thus bail out.

Nodding head violently in agreement. I have a similar post idea in my head about code re-use. For years the nirvana I aspired to was to ensure there was no code duplication. When we finally got to that point the fear, and complexity of change of core components created such exponential risk it was crazy, even with meticulous high quality unit tests across the board. The only virtue of it was to scare off the feint hearted from messing with it. Insomniac out.

A brilliant insight into X-Ray, thanks Andy.

Another fine post!

Hi Andy, I was just thinking about the direct SSM access as I really don't like surfacing potentially sensitive SSM params to environment variables. Caching sounds good but the link you have is to a Python library - have you had a look at aws-parameter-cache ? Looks good but in implementing would need to be careful that the cache is declared outside of the Lambda handlers so it persists between invocations ( caching )