I build a lot of automated workflows. Across the suite of apps that powers Ready, Set, Cloud, I have a dozen or so mature, long-running automations that do some work, wait for something, then do more work. A great example is my newsletter. I often write it on Fridays and publish it on Mondays. After I open a PR for an issue, my backend service does some initial work, but it waits until Monday to send the emails and start analytics tracking.
In the past, I've used the Step Functions Wait state for this because it's the exact use case it was designed for. But as part of a big refactor I did to separate Ready, Set, Cloud logic from the generic newsletter logic, I needed to find a simpler way to schedule work - ideally as part of my CI/CD pipeline.
I thought using the AWS SDK in a script to create a one-time EventBridge schedule that published an event at a designated time was my best bet. But that brings in some implications with IAM and passing roles to the scheduler in order to invoke a PutEvents call. It ended up being way too messy for a simple CI script.
But I had an epiphany that immediately made me think, "I should write about this" because it's very simple but not always obvious.
