aws-news-bot

README

AWS News Feed

A Lambda function that polls the AWS What's New and AWS News Blog RSS feeds and posts each new item to a Bluesky account.

Configuration

The Lambda is configured via environment variables:

Variable	Description
BLUESKY_HANDLE	Bluesky handle to post as (e.g. awsnews.bsky.social).
BLUESKY_PASSWORD_PATH	SSM Parameter Store path containing the Bluesky app password (decrypted at startup).
DYNAMODB_TABLE_NAME	DynamoDB table that tracks which items have already been posted.
WHATSNEW_RSSFEED_URL	URL of the AWS What's New RSS feed.
NEWSBLOG_RSSFEED_URL	URL of the AWS News Blog RSS feed.
LOG_LEVEL	Optional. zerolog level (debug, info, warn, error). Defaults to info.

Build

make build      # Lambda artifact (linux/arm64) at bin/awsnewsbot/bootstrap
make package    # zips the artifact at artifacts/awsnewsbot.zip
make deploy     # pushes the zip to AWS Lambda
make local-build # native build for local testing

The build embeds the current git describe output as main.Version and logs it at startup so the deployed commit is visible in CloudWatch.

Behaviour

• Posts are rate-limited to one per second.
• Each invocation processes at most 50 posts so a backlog cannot exceed the Lambda timeout; remaining items are picked up on the next scheduled run.
• Each post is created with a deterministic rkey derived from the item GUID, so a re-attempt after a crash or transient failure cannot create a duplicate on Bluesky.
• A new Bluesky session is created on every invocation, which avoids stale session JWT failures on warm Lambda containers.
• The two feeds run independently; one feed's failure does not silence the other.