AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity seems to have a new, barely-documented, policy
condition key. It's called sts:RoleAuthorizedByIdp and if you're anything like
me (my condolences), that name will pique your interest. It's not super useful
today (unless you're running an OIDC IdP), but its utility will grow as adoption
improves over time. So here's what I've learned so far.
Earlier today, AWS IAM Identity Center launched the ability for server-side applications to assume roles on behalf of their users. This is a big deal, I've wanted this exact kind of functionality for years. The docs are pretty sparse on how it works and what the events look like in CloudTrail, so here are my field notes, recommendations on whether you should use it today and feature requests for whichever AWS service team is working on this.
AWS launched Lambda MicroVMs earlier today. They're quite cool, and I imagine they'll become quite popular quite quickly. Here are some notes on things I've discovered about them today.
Amazon has deprecated CloudTrail Lake as of 1st June 2026 for new customers. I assume this is due to lack of uptake. I never got around to properly using it, and I'm a CloudTrail fan! So I can only imagine not many others used it. In its place, Amazon recommends that we "explore CloudWatch". I explored CloudWatch and came away quite disappointed.
I've been interested in micro-transactions for about as long as I can remember. I've wanted to sell something for a tiny amount of money ever since I learned about PayPal's micro-transaction support via NearlyFreeSpeech, the hosting provider. I've finally done it, by combining some of the oldest and newest tech I can think of: faxes and AI.
I was looking at the execution history for a Step Functions state machine that is triggered daily by an EventBridge Scheduler schedule. The execution names caught my eye — they look like UUIDs, they're not UUIDv7, but there's clearly a pattern. It got me excited in the same way that noticing AWS access key IDs were similarly-formatted back in 2020. So of course I had to dig in.
I've been writing software for 25 years, and been getting paid for the last 20. My AWS account will be turning 18 this September, and it should be quite the celebration. If I may toot my own horn: I've got pretty good at writing and deploying software in that time - to the point that you're actually spending your time reading this blog. All this, and the release of Opus 4.5 in November 2025 hit me like a tonne of bricks. My value-add (as I knew it) would soon be over.
AWS principal tags are useful for fine-grained access control. As an organisation administrator, you can craft service control policies (SCPs) that only allow tagged roles to call sensitive APIs. The problem then becomes: how do you guarantee that the tags are legitimate? This is where resource control policies (RCPs) come in handy - I provide a demonstration of them in this blog post, and an example of what you can achieve with the trustworthy tags in place.