# A Story of Delayed AWS Pipelines

DevFeed: [A Story of Delayed AWS Pipelines](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/a-story-of-delayed-aws-pipelines-23718.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/booking-com-development/a-story-of-delayed-aws-pipelines-382e4a1fede6?source=rss----1c36c35f9c76---4>)

Author: Vladimir Romashov

Published: 2026-05-08T14:23:22Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Booking.com Development - Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/booking-com-development-medium.md>)

Topics: [Amazon Web Services](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/aws.md>), [Terraform](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/terraform.md>), [AWS Organizations](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/aws-organizations.md>), [Infrastructure as code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/infrastructure-as-code.md>), [CI/CD](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cicd.md>), [Security](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/security.md>)

Tags: [aws](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/aws.md>), [aws-organizations](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/aws-organizations.md>), [booking](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/booking.md>), [ci-cd](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ci-cd.md>), [ci-cd-pipeline](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ci-cd-pipeline.md>), [infrastructure-as-code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/infrastructure-as-code.md>), [pii](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pii.md>), [terraform](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/terraform.md>)

## AI overview

The article investigates delays in Terraform CI/CD pipelines caused by repeated use of the aws_organizations_organization data source and interactions with the AWS Organizations API. Testing found that roughly 1 in 10 Terraform pipelines were affected, with delays ranging from 1 to 15 minutes, while comparable CDK pipelines were not delayed.

## Source excerpt

How a seemingly simple AWS API call can silently slow down your CI/CD pipelines Review/co-researcher: Gonzalo Ulla The Mystery It started with a line in one of our team's CI/CD logs that nobody expected: module.project.module.user_buckets.module.s3_bucket.data.aws_organizations_organization.current: Still reading... [15m10s elapsed] 15 minutes and 10 seconds -- just to read organization data. A value that should return in milliseconds was holding up entire pipelines. After digging deeper, we discovered this wasn't a one-off issue. During testing, roughly 1 in 10 pipelines containing Terraform were affected, with delays ranging from 1 to 15 minutes each. At Booking.com, we deploy and manage our AWS infrastructure using two primary Infrastructure as Code (IaC) technologies: Terraform and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). To standardize and enforce our compliance and security controls, we maintain a set of internal Terraform and CDK modules to provision resources that handle personally identifiable information (PII). Interestingly, only Terraform pipelines were affected by this issue -- CDK ones running in the same accounts and against the same AWS Organization were completed without any delays. [spoiler alert/] CDK uses CloudFormation under the hood, which doesn't make additional Organizations API calls directly. [/spoiler alert]. This ruled out a general AWS-side outage or account-level throttling and pointed us toward something specific to how Terraform interacts with the Organizations API. This is the story of how we tracked down the root cause -- and why the fix isn't as simple as you'd think. What is aws_organizations_organization? Terraform's aws_organizations_organization data source retrieves information about, guess what, your AWS Organization. On the surface, it maps to the AWS DescribeOrganization API call -- a flat request. No iteration. No pagination. Simple... Or so we thought. The First Clue: Reproducing the Issue The references to the Organizations API mostly c