[Dunedan]

My biggest criticism of Parameter Store is actually that it's free. Let me explain:

Because it's free they limit the requests per seconds you can make to the Parameter Store. That's especially noticeable when doing requests for all parameters of a given path, as the limit is way lower there than for requesting (a bunch of) individual parameters. In the past that caused serious problems for us when using Parameter Store for AWS Lambda functions during a deploy of new versions of functions, as suddenly there was a spike in the number of requests to Parameter Store as all AWS Lambda containers got replaced.

They of course set such limits because it's free, so I'd gladly pay for getting increased limits.

[scrollaway]

Oh yeah, I agree - and I have no beef with the per-request pricing. It's the per-secret pricing that's weird. If I understand this announcement correctly, you're still paying for KMS separately as well, so that's not where the price spike comes from...

[drodgers]

Oh, yeah, we just ran into this recently when rolling-out parameter store. For anyone else having this problem, the trick was to use the GetParametersByPath API method (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/APIRefere...) instead of the more flexible DescribeParameters (which has stupidly low, undocumented rate limits).

[Dunedan]

At the time we experienced the problems GetParametersByPath had way lower limits than GetParameters (~an order of magnitude)! That's the problem we ran into. That was already back at the end of last year and the SSM team promised to improve the situation, but so far at least no publicly available news states something about it.