ssm rate limiting

I was spending a little bit of time trying to scrape some ssm stuff and i figured out that there seems to be a “feature” built in to ssm that doesn’t let you do too many describes. AWS will complain and say NO BUENO if you do it to often.

aws ssm describe-parameters | jq '.Parameters[]| "\(.Name) \(.Type)"'

An error occurred (ThrottlingException) when calling the DescribeParameters operation (reached max retries: 2): Rate exceeded

I thought that was kind of a nice thing to stop people from describe everythign too often. It can be seen as a security feature as well.