Just Do It

Don’t mean for this blog to turn into an endless stream of “gripe about all things AWS” posts, but once again today I ran into an issue that I feel the system ought to be able to figure out on my behalf.

I’m trying to deploy a CloudFormation template (which, not my favorite) in us-west-2. There’s a small bit of configuration (the WAF rules) that are globally applicable, and when not deployed in us-east-1, this causes the whole template deployment to fail (with an utter non-sequitur of an error message):

I mean, obviously that means I’m trying to deploy in an unsupported region, am I right? (eye roll)

Oh CloudFormation, why aren’t you smart enough to just apply the parts that must be global in any region? Right now you’re forcing me to either 1) deploy the whole thing in us-east-1, which I don’t want to do for locality reasons, or 2) split the template into two pieces, which adds complexity. Boo!