EventBridge Emoji Event Patterns

Photo by Denis Cherkashin on Unsplash

Background

The other day, I was answering some questions a coworker had about EventBridge. He then jokingly said “I wonder if I can use emojis for an event pattern because they are UTF-8.”

After that conversation, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I threw together a quick CDK stack and it works!

Try it yourself

I’ve made my quick CDK stack public on Github. You’re welcome to test with mine.

This stack contains

• A rule with emojis only in the Event Pattern on the default event bus
• A Lambda as the target of the rule that will be invoked and logs the event

Steps

1. Clone the repo
2. Configure your AWS credentials locally if you have not yet
3. npm i && npm run cdk deploy to deploy the stack
4. Put events on the default event bus with either the CLI, and AWS SDK, or in the AWS console. The event pattern is detailType: ['💩'] and source: ['🐶'].
5. Check the Lambda’s CloudWatch logs to see that it has been invoked

Closing

You can also update the code to contain other emojis as well. From my testing, I found having multiple emojis in a single event pattern works as well.

Not 100% practical in all cases, but thought I would share these findings publicly. Now go forth and update your EventBridge event patterns. 🎉