This is going to be a short post. It's mainly going to be about the new(ish) feature on AWS for how Dates are displayed and formatted, and what's so special about that coming from a user of AWS.

I haven't seen much on this topic, so please excuse this if I missed the announcement and this is old news.

First, we'll look at raw cloud watch logs for times. In the above image, you can see that times are accurate and down to the millisecond. They are in UTC. UTC does not have a timezone, but it is how we keep time synced up across the world. Wikipedia has a nice article on it. Even with this standard, and being able to easily calculate current time, it still adds to the cognitive load while looking at dates/times on AWS in logs. More than once I have messed up the timing when sifting through lots of logs, especially if it takes a while. Having to swap between local time and UTC can get old fast.

Now, we'll look at Step Functions and the "new" modal that pops up when you click the time values. In this version that AWS recently released (at least that I noticed), you now have the default time in local time that is displayed in the table, but now with the model you get 4+ different ways to display the time.

With the modal, you can see UTC, ISO, Local (with UTC Offset, which includes daylights savings time), and unix timestamp. Now you don't have to pick one and only see it. Now if you don't have to do calculations on the fly.

A huge win for virtual teams across the country and especially across the globe: now you can see times that makes sense to you while also seeing the times that others would see. If you are 4 hours apart, you can use UTC to refer to the exact time regardless of timezone, but then while looking at the same pages at the same time, you can see what it is in local time.

I often work on systems that pull data from outside sources, and those sources also have many different dates/times we have to keep track of. It can get complicated quickly when debugging things. Have this in AWS helps to remove some of the complications, and makes things more simple to discuss.

This is a very powerful update. Although it is small addition, this feature has a huge impact on the developer experience of my team while using and maintaining AWS resources!

Current services I have seen use this is just Step Functions. Code Build has a different approach: time swaps between a few types of time formatting, but not nearly as powerful or complete as the modal.

I really hope to see AWS add this to all of their services where dates are displayed. I think it would be useful, it would improve developer experience, and reduce time to get things done or investigate issues.

What do you think of the new time modal for step functions logs?