AWS: The State of Account State

 In September 2025, AWS announced that the Account information in the Organizations Service will have a new State field to replace the Status field. Since that date, both fields are available for all Organizations operations, but the Status field is vowed to be removed on September 2026.

When you read such an announcement and you know your code is using the Status field, you project to review your code and update it. So we did quite immediately, but we could not see the new State field when executing our lambdas. So we postponed the update for later.

Recently, I had another look at the problem, and still could not see any State field appearing in lambdas. I tested some call to DescribeAccount within CloudShell, but the field was really there. So I decided to run the following lambda:

import boto3

import botocore

def lambda_handler(event, context):

    print("boto3:", boto3.__version__)

    print("botocore:", botocore.__version__)

    org_client = boto3.client("organizations")

    response = org_client.describe_account(AccountId="123456789012")

    print(response)

I was surprised by the result.

boto3: 1.40.4
botocore: 1.40.4

Those versions were released in August 2025, before the update. CloudShell in my test uses botocore 1.42.72, which is from March this year. When I notified AWS Support about it, they just told me to use a Layer with a more recent botocore included. How long should I keep this temporary workaround?

AWS: Duplicates in Search Provisioned Products

 Using our beloved boto3 library, we are looking for the list of all our Provisioned Products in Service Catalog.

sc_client = boto3.client('servicecatalog')

result = sc_client.search_provisioned_products(

    PageSize=20

)

I won't bore you with th code that loops over the result and perform the operation again if we have more than 20 products. But the strange thing, is that wherever we had more than the page size, some products were repeated in the other pages. Thinking of a bug in AWS Service Catalog, we reached out to the Support Team. This is their answer:

This is a known behavior with the SearchProvisionedProducts API when using the default relevance-based sorting. Because results are sorted by relevance, the ordering can shift slightly between paginated requests, which causes duplicates (or occasionally missed items) across pages.

Never heard of relevance-based sorting. Looking at the documentation, there is no mention of it:

SortBy

The sort field. If no value is specified, the results are not sorted. The valid values are arn, id, name, and lastRecordId.

 Then, Support Team is proposing a solution:

Adding SortBy='createdTime' gives the pagination a stable ordering, so the page token points to a consistent boundary between pages. No more duplicates should appear regardless of how many provisioned products you have.

It is interesting to note that 'createdTime' is not listed in the documentation either. We tried it and it works. So a hidden feature solves a known bug.

Collectors.toMap does not like null

 This article was originally published on JRoller on November 26, 2015

Some map accept null values, some don't. How do you know? You usually take a look in the javadoc. But what about maps created by streams through the Collectors.toMap? The javadoc does not say. So I tried out. I picked the following code:

 	List<String> player = Arrays.asList("Lebron", "Kobe", "Shaquille");
	List<String> team = Arrays.asList("Cleveland", "Los Angeles", null);
	
	Map<String, String> currentTeam = new HashMap<>();
	for (int i = 0; i < player.size(); i++) {
		currentTeam.put(player.get(i), team.get(i));
	}

Everything works as expected, it inserts the null value into my map. So I tried to convert it to streams (maybe not in the best way):

	Map<String, String> currentTeam = IntStream.range(0, player.size())
		.mapToObj(i -> i)
		.collect(Collectors.toMap(i -> player.get(i), i -> team.get(i)));

Here is what I get:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
	at java.util.HashMap.merge(HashMap.java:1216)
	at java.util.stream.Collectors.lambda$toMap$148(Collectors.java:1320)
	at java.util.stream.Collectors$$Lambda$6/149928006.accept(Unknown Source)
	at java.util.stream.ReduceOps$3ReducingSink.accept(ReduceOps.java:169)
	at java.util.stream.IntPipeline$4$1.accept(IntPipeline.java:250)
	at java.util.stream.Streams$RangeIntSpliterator.forEachRemaining(Streams.java:110)
	at java.util.Spliterator$OfInt.forEachRemaining(Spliterator.java:693)
	at java.util.stream.AbstractPipeline.copyInto(AbstractPipeline.java:512)
	at java.util.stream.AbstractPipeline.wrapAndCopyInto(AbstractPipeline.java:502)
	at java.util.stream.ReduceOps$ReduceOp.evaluateSequential(ReduceOps.java:708)
	at java.util.stream.AbstractPipeline.evaluate(AbstractPipeline.java:234)
	at java.util.stream.ReferencePipeline.collect(ReferencePipeline.java:499)
	at Test.main(Test.java:23)

Is it using a kind of Map that does not accept null values? Let's check:

   public static <T, K, U>
    Collector<T, ?, Map<K,U>> toMap(Function<? super T, ? extends K> keyMapper,
                                    Function<? super T, ? extends U> valueMapper) {
        return toMap(keyMapper, valueMapper, throwingMerger(), HashMap::new);
    } 

Well, no. It uses a standard HashMap. In the stack, the Exception is thrown from the HashMap.merge() function. So let's have a look:

   @Override
    public V merge(K key, V value,
                   BiFunction<? super V, ? super V, ? extends V> remappingFunction) {
        if (value == null)
            throw new NullPointerException();
	...
    }

So the problem is not in the type of map but in the implementation of the merge. The javadoc for the HashMap merge() method says that the value parameter is "the non-null value to be merged with the existing value associated with the key". So yes, it says it in the Javadoc, but not where you would expect it.

By the way, if you really want to make it work with streams, you would have to supply your own collector (as an aside note, the same problem arises with the groupBy collector) :

	Map<String, String> currentTeam = IntStream.range(0, player.size())
		.mapToObj(i -> i)
		.collect(HashMap::new,
			(map, i) -> map.put(player.get(i), team.get(i)),
			HashMap::putAll);

Maybe I'll stick with the loop for this time.

Lambda Before Switch

 This article was originally published in JRoller on September 22, 2015.

We had this method that was doing the same thing several times in a row. Here is a simplified version:

void resolveAll() {
	a = resolveA();
	if (a == null)
		states.remove(State.A);
	else
		states.add(State.A);

	b = resolveB();
	if (b == null)
		states.remove(State.B);
	else
		states.add(State.B);

	c = resolveC();
	if (c == null)
		states.remove(State.C);
	else
		states.add(State.C);
} 

It's almost the same thing repeated three times (a bit more in the real life code), except for this method resolveX which is different each time, returning a different type of object. We needed to modify the code, but did not feel like having to repeat the change several times. So we resorted to a refactoring. But what to do with this resolveX method? Inner classes are really ugly, so we turned to a switch:

void resolveAll() {
	a = resolve(State.A);
	b = resolve(State.B);
	c = resolve(State.C);
} 
	
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
private <T> T resolve(State state) {
	T resolved = null;
	switch (state) {
		case A:
			resolved = (T) resolveA();
			break;
		case B:
			resolved = (T) resolveB();
			break;
		case C:
			resolved = (T) resolveC();
			break;
	} 

	if (resolved == null) {
		states.remove(state);
	}  else {
		states.add(state);
	} 
	
	return resolved;
} 

Not that much simpler than the original code. However, we are moving slowly to Java 8. With lambdas, inner classes do not look so ugly anymore:

void resolveAll() {
	a = resolve(State.A, this::resolveA);
	b = resolve(State.B, this::resolveB);
	c = resolve(State.C, this::resolveC);
} 

private <T> T resolve(State state, Supplier<T> resolver) {
	T resolved = resolver.get();
	
	if (resolved == null) {
		states.remove(state);
	}  else {
		states.add(state);
	} 
	
	return resolved;
}