Using AWS Organizations for learning and personal projects

If you work on many projects deployed to AWS over time, it can become more difficult to track what resources are where and what relates to what. Tagging can help a lot, so can regions. For example I can deploy one project to us-west-1 and another to us-west-2.

Another idea is to take advantages of multiple AWS accounts and manage them as an Organization. There’s no additional cost for each account or setting up the Organization, the costs are still only for the resources you are using.

Now you have multiple accounts to segregate various projects or other things you’re working on, instead of logging off one account and logging on to the other and switching back a forth, you can assume a role within other accounts from the Account dropdown and ‘Switch Roles’. This option is only visible if you are signed on as an IAM user and not the root account user.

Before you get to this step, in the account you want to switch to, create a new IAM role with the permissions you need to use, and in the Trust section, add the account id for the other account where you want to assume the role from. The complete the fields above and insert the ARN id for the role.

After the first time you’ve used this switch role feature, you’ll see the role in the Account dropdown to reuse later.

Installing Maven tool support in vanilla Eclipse IDE

If you download an Eclipse bundle like the Eclipse IDE for Java EE developers, you’ll get Maven support built in, but if you download a vanilla Eclipse install (like from using from of the daily builds), you’ll need to install many pllugins yourself.

Eclipse support for Maven is provided via the m2Eclipse plugin, there are installation instructions here:

I’ve had luck using these installer buttons before, but on this daily build for M1 they don’t seem to do anything. Instead I used the manual approach by adding a new ‘site’ in ‘Add New Software, ‘ adding https://download.eclipse.org/technology/m2e/releases/latest/ and then selecting ‘Maven Integration for Eclipse’ :

Done!

Installing Eclipse IDE for Apple M1 Silicon

Update January 2022: Since writing this official release versions are now available with MacOS AArch64 builds for M1 Macs from the main downloads page: https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/

From the official Eclipse downloads page as of 10/31/21 there aren’t any M1 builds ready for download. However, following the comments on this bug/feature request, there have been daily builds for M1 it looks like for some time. The daily builds are available here.

I downloaded the latest stable build from here:

Double-clicking the downloaded .dmg and then dragging the Eclipse app into Applications is all that was needed to install. Done!