Today I got an update notice for a plugin that is really helpful in my job as a Cloud Governance Engineer: aws-extend-switch-roles

The plugin lets me switch between the many roles I need to use without filling out the switch role form each time I need to use it.

The update page had some red text warning it was a major update, but the way it was worded, I couldn’t really understand the meaning:

• Change showing the Role List UI from a browser extension menu outside the AWS Console page

So I just figured it was fixing a problem I’d seen recently where the formatting of the accounts was a bit wonky thanks to some UX changes that AWS had been making (the biggest one being they had changed the menu drop down to be dark mode with light text on a dark background).

So I logged into AWS to see if the problem I’d been seeing was fixed, only to see that there were none of my 100+ roles displayed:

So I started poking around to see if it was something I had broken, or if the format of the configuration had changed. First thing I looked at was the configuration page, and noticed a couple of settings had changed, and said they were “temporarily disabled”.

Thinking that might be my issue, I toggled them with no change. I looked at the console, and saw that there were no errors either, so now I figured it was broken and jumped on the website for the plugin.

There were not really any issues that matched what I was seeing so I reported it as a problem with the update. Then quite by accident I clicked on the little key icon for the plugin, and there were all my accounts. Apparently that update notice really meant: we moved the roles from where AWS shows them to the extension menu.

The only other thing I ended up doing was removing a bunch of plugins, since that little key icon wasn’t even visible when I first discovered this problem.