I too had issues with this approach. My initial approach to the problem was to put it in the constructors as you suggested, however a couple of issues pushed me in this direction for the moment. Primarily this is a bigger change than the pull request about IAM role credentials and I didn't want to hold that one up for this. Second, which should take precedence, the hard coded value in the code or the value of the property? I don't know, so I decided to punt and chose the easier one for separating the pull requests.