ExAws

A flexible easy to use set of AWS APIs.

• ExAws.Cloudwatch
• ExAws.Dynamo
• ExAws.DynamoStreams
• ExAws.ElasticTranscoder
• ExAws.Firehose
• ExAws.Kinesis
• ExAws.KMS
• ExAws.Lambda
• ExAws.RDS
• ExAws.Route53
• ExAws.S3
• ExAws.SES
• ExAws.SNS
• ExAws.SQS
• ExAws.STS
• ExAws.Cloudformation (BETA)
• ExAws.EC2 (BETA)
• ExAws.ECS (COMING SOON)

1.0.0 Changes

The v0.5 branch holds the legacy approach.

ExAws 1.0.0 takes a more data driven approach to querying APIs. The various functions that exist inside a service like S3.list_objects or Dynamo.create_table all return a struct which holds the information necessary to make that particular operation.

You then have 4 ways you can choose to execute that operation:

# Simple
S3.list_buckets |> ExAws.request #=> {:ok, response}
# With per request configuration overrides
S3.list_buckets |> ExAws.request(config) #=> {:ok, response}

# Raise on error, return successful responses directly
S3.list_buckets |> ExAws.request! #=> response
S3.list_buckets |> ExAws.request!(config) #=> response

Certain operations also support Elixir streams:

S3.list_objects("my-bucket") |> ExAws.stream! #=> #Function<13.52451638/2 in Stream.resource/3>
S3.list_objects("my-bucket") |> ExAws.stream!(config) #=> #Function<13.52451638/2 in Stream.resource/3>

The ability to return a stream is noticed in the function’s documentation.

Migration

TL;DR: Do this now:

ExAws.S3.get_object("my-bucket", "path/to/object") |> ExAws.request

not

ExAws.S3.get_object("my-bucket", "path/to/object")

This change greatly simplifies the ExAws code paths, and removes entirely the complex meta-programming pervasive to the original approach. However, it does constitute a breaking change for anyone who had a client with custom logic.

DynamoDB Users

Lists are always encoded as dynamodb lists now. Previously if you had [1,2,3] it would be encoded as an integer set. This had issues because if the list was [1,2,1] you could get an error because the items are not unique.

Highlighted Features

• Easy configuration.
• Minimal dependencies. Choose your favorite JSON codec and HTTP client.
• Elixir streams to automatically retrieve paginated resources.
• Elixir protocols allow easy customization of Dynamo encoding / decoding.
• mix kinesis.tail your-stream-name task for easily watching the contents of a kinesis stream.
• Simple. ExAws aims to provide a clear and consistent elixir wrapping around AWS APIs, not abstract them away entirely. For every action in a given AWS API there is a corresponding function within the appropriate module. Higher level abstractions like the aforementioned streams are in addition to and not instead of basic API calls.

Getting started

Add ex_aws to your mix.exs, along with your json parser and http client of choice. ExAws works out of the box with Poison and :hackney and sweet_xml. All APIs require an http client, but only some require a json or xml codec. You only need the codec for the API you intend to use. At this time only SweetXml is supported for xml parsing.

• Dynamo: json
• Kinesis: json
• Kms: json
• Lambda: json
• SQS: xml
• S3: xml

If you wish to use instance roles to obtain AWS access keys you will need to add a JSON codec whether the particular API requires one or not.

def deps do
  [
    {:ex_aws, "~> 1.0"},
    {:poison, "~> 2.0"},
    {:hackney, "~> 1.6"}
  ]
end

Don’t forget to add :hackney to your applications list if that’s in fact the http client you choose. :ex_aws must always be added to your applications list.

def application do
  [applications: [:ex_aws, :hackney, :poison]]
end

That’s it!

ExAws has by default the equivalent including the following in your mix.exs

config :ex_aws,
  access_key_id: [{:system, "AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID"}, :instance_role],
  secret_access_key: [{:system, "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"}, :instance_role],

This means it will try to resolve credentials in order

• Look for the AWS standard AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables

• Resolve credentials with IAM

  • If running inside ECS and a task role has been assigned it will use it
  • Otherwise it will fall back to the instance role

AWS CLI config files are supported, but require an additional dependency:

{:configparser_ex, "~> 0.2.1"}

You can then add {:awscli, "profile_name", timeout} to the above config and it will pull information from ~/.aws/config and ~/.aws/credentials

config :ex_aws,
  access_key_id: [{:system, "AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID"}, {:awscli, "default", 30}, :instance_role],
  secret_access_key: [{:system, "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"}, {:awscli, "default", 30}, :instance_role],

Retries

ExAws will retry failed AWS API requests using exponential backoff per the “Full Jitter” formula described in https://www.awsarchitectureblog.com/2015/03/backoff.html

The algorithm uses three values, which are configurable:

# default values shown below

config :ex_aws, :retries,
  max_attempts: 10,
  base_backoff_in_ms: 10,
  max_backoff_in_ms: 10_000

• max_attempts is the maximum number of possible attempts with backoffs in between each one
• base_backoff_in_ms corresponds to the base value described in the blog post
• max_backoff_in_ms corresponds to the cap value described in the blog post

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2014 CargoSense, Inc.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.