At work, I made this script to “tail” CloudFormation events. The script is in Next Generation Shell, of which I am the author. Questions, comments, requests for improvements are welcome. Since it’s relatively small script, I’ll just post it here.

F epoch_time(s:Str) Time(s.split('.')[0] + '.000Z').Int() # NGS doesn't handle fractions of seconds yet

F main(stack_name:Str, interval:Int=2, start_limit=20, empty_line_seconds=60) {

	last_seen = null

	while true {
		events = ``aws cloudformation describe-stack-events --stack-name $stack_name``.reverse()
		start = if last_seen {
			events.index(last_seen) + 1
		} else {
			max(len(events) - start_limit, 0)
		}
		new_events = events[start..null]

		for e in new_events {

			t = e.Timestamp.epoch_time()
			if last_seen {
				if t - last_seen.Timestamp.epoch_time() > empty_line_seconds {
					echo("")
				}
			}

			reason = '  ' +? e.get('ResourceStatusReason', '')
			echo("${e.Timestamp}  ${e.ResourceType.Str(50)} ${e.LogicalResourceId.Str(30)} ${e.ResourceStatus}${reason}")
			last_seen = e
		}
		$(sleep $interval)
	}
}

The script is on GitHub, in “NGS Scripts Dumpster” repository.