AWS Best Practices

AWS Best Practices Skill

Ask your AI coding agent "how should I secure my S3 bucket" and get sourced, locally cataloged AWS best practices, skipping both stale training data and costly live research.

A skill for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex that collects the best practices of every AWS service, and nothing else. Find recommendations by use case: security, reliability, performance, cost, operations, sustainability, each one linked to its official AWS source.

Project page: https://ferdinandobons.github.io/AWSBestPracticesSkill/

Latest release: v0.1.5

Unofficial project: this is an independent community-maintained skill. It is not an official AWS skill, AWS product, or AWS-maintained resource, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services.

Scope: this skill contains only best practices. No service descriptions, no pricing, no tutorials, no code walkthroughs. Just what AWS recommends you do, organized so you can act on it, each item linked to its official AWS source.

Why this instead of just asking the model directly

There are three ways an AI agent can answer "what are the best practices for this AWS service":

1. From memory: free and instant, but the model's training data goes stale the moment AWS ships a new feature, renames a service, or updates its Well-Architected guidance. It will still answer confidently even when it's wrong or out of date.
2. Live research: the agent runs web searches or queries an AWS documentation MCP server on the spot, every time. This gets it right, but it's expensive: several search → fetch → read round-trips, burning tens of thousands of tokens, repeated for every question, even the same one asked twice.
3. This skill: the research is already done, once, per service, and stored as a small, source-linked file. The agent opens exactly services/<category>/<service>.md, reads a few hundred lines, and answers, no live search needed and no repeated token cost, while every practice is still traceable to an official docs.aws.amazon.com / aws.amazon.com / wa.aws.amazon.com page. And because content ages, a documented refresh loop (below) keeps it from silently drifting back into "stale training data" territory.

What it contains / does NOT contain

✅ Contains	❌ Does not contain
Best practices per service, by Well-Architected pillar	Service overviews / "what is X"
[when-it-applies] context tags per practice	Pricing, cost estimates, calculators
Cross-service general best practices	Tutorials / getting-started / how-to
Official AWS source link on every item	Extended code samples

Quick start

Claude Code (plugin, recommended):

claude plugin marketplace add ferdinandobons/AWSBestPracticesSkill
claude plugin install aws-best-practices@aws-best-practices-skill

Update with claude plugin update aws-best-practices, remove with claude plugin uninstall aws-best-practices. (Same steps work as /plugin marketplace add ... and /plugin install ... from inside an active Claude Code session.)

OpenAI Codex CLI (plugin, recommended):

codex plugin marketplace add ferdinandobons/AWSBestPracticesSkill
codex plugin add aws-best-practices@aws-best-practices-skill

Update with codex plugin marketplace upgrade aws-best-practices-skill, remove with codex plugin remove aws-best-practices@aws-best-practices-skill.

Manual install (backup, works for both):

# Claude Code
git clone https://github.com/ferdinandobons/AWSBestPracticesSkill ~/.claude/skills/aws-best-practices

# OpenAI Codex CLI
git clone https://github.com/ferdinandobons/AWSBestPracticesSkill ~/.codex/skills/aws-best-practices

Update anytime with git -C <path-above> pull.

Restart the tool if it's open. Two ways to use it:

Direct, invoke the skill by name:

• Claude Code: /aws-best-practices (manual install) or /aws-best-practices:aws-best-practices (plugin install; plugin skills are namespaced as plugin:skill).
• Codex CLI: reference aws-best-practices in your prompt (e.g. "use the aws-best-practices skill for...").

Indirect, just ask a question about a service and it triggers automatically, no invocation needed:

"best practices for securing my S3 bucket" · "how should I run DynamoDB for high traffic" · "AWS account security baseline" · "is my Lambda function set up correctly for production"

Either way, the model reads SKILL.md, opens the matching services/<category>/<service>.md (or general/<topic>.md), and answers with sourced best practices; it won't need to open anything else in this repo.

How answers are shaped

The skill is scenario-first. If you ask for a specific case, the agent should select the relevant practices instead of dumping the whole service file: