Making the CloudFormation release history into RSS

Update (2018-09-16): I've taken this down as AWS now provide a feed.

I’m working with CloudFormation a lot these days, both at Time Out and for deploying this blog and some other scripts I run on AWS Lambda.

Major updates to CloudFormation are announced on the AWS What’s New Blog, but smaller changes seem to only end up somewhat buried on the Release History page at the end of the docs.

I want to see all the updates, but not by compulsively visiting it daily. I also just started properly reading RSS in a feed reader - perfect!

There are a few tools that will let you turn changes on a webpage into an RSS feed, but why use a third party site when you can do it yourself in a few lines of Python? After about 30 minutes I had a viable script, and then maybe more 60 (half spent waiting for CloudFront) I had it running on AWS Lambda.

If you too want to follow every CloudFormation update, it’s at cfn-rss.adamj.eu. You could also transmute the feed with Zapier into e.g. slack messages.

Enjoy!

Update (2018-01-30): Thanks /u/jhakonen for pointing out some initial flaws with this in the Reddit comments.

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Tags: aws, cloudformation

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