Washery Credential Refresh Enhancement

Introduction

We’re excited to announce an important enhancement to the Washery tool, focusing on improved credential management during CloudFormation stack operations. This update addresses a crucial aspect of AWS credential handling during stack creation retry scenarios.

Features

Enhanced Credential Refresh Mechanism

The primary enhancement in this release is the implementation of automatic credential refresh during CloudFormation stack creation retry attempts. This feature ensures that:

• AWS credentials are properly refreshed when retrying failed stack creation attempts
• Seamless handling of long-running operations that might exceed credential expiration
• More robust error recovery during stack creation processes

Technical Implementation

The enhancement adds a strategic credential refresh call (assumeRole) within the stack creation retry logic. This ensures that:

• Fresh credentials are available for each retry attempt
• The tool maintains proper authentication throughout extended operations
• Reduced likelihood of credential-related failures during recovery procedures

Example

The implementation involves a simple but crucial addition to the stack creation retry logic:

if [ "${cfExitStatus}" != 0 ]; then
    echo "Failed to start stack ${cfExitStatus}; checking to see if status is recoverable"
    assumeRole    # New addition: Refresh credentials before retry attempts
    l=1
    lastStatus=""
    for (( ; l; )); do
        # Retry logic continues...
    done
fi

Benefits

This enhancement provides several key benefits:

1. Improved Reliability: Ensures that credential expiration doesn’t interfere with stack recovery attempts
2. Better Error Handling: More robust handling of long-running stack operations
3. Reduced Failures: Minimizes authentication-related failures during retry scenarios

Conclusion

This release represents an important improvement in Washery’s reliability and robustness when handling AWS CloudFormation operations. Users will benefit from more reliable stack creation processes, especially in scenarios requiring multiple retry attempts.

Upgrading

No special upgrade steps are required. Users will automatically benefit from this enhancement when using the latest version of Washery.

For more information about Washery, visit the GitHub repository.