AWS SDK for Node.js (Preview) | Hacker News Reader

AWS SDK for Node.js (Preview)

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118 pointsjeffbarr22 comments

Even if there are already about twenty AWS libraries on NPM, this is a welcome addition. One nasty part of the Node.js ecosystem is the elevated risk that the owner of a library you depend on goes AWOL. For some reason (maybe the low barrier to publishing with github + npm) this risk is incredibly high with Node.js libraries. So it's nice to see AWS put their weight behind this.

It's also nice to see a language-specific library that doesn't layer on a bunch of opinions/abstractions on top of the underlying HTTP API. Makes it a lot easier to grok, debug, and leverage existing documentation.

If there's anyone from AWS trolling these parts...will there ever be support for Node.js in Beanstalk?

Not all the owners go AWOL, especially for pieces of code that were created for the purpose of going into production. In fact, the lack of official SDK support is the actual cause of so many alternatives. For some of us, it creates a proper foundation in the long run. For example, I don't have the actual time to implement an end-to-end SDK. But hacking some code to get the job done was possible, while others found my hacks actually useful. It isn't ideal, but the World itself is far from that.

Here's a good response from such an owner: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/nodejs/W...

Actually I am such an owner. I'm interested to see if the AWS SDK could be used as foundation, even though my own implementation is just a thin wrapper plus an S3 client, most of the time doing the low level plumbing (such as request signing).

there are quite a few people depending on aws-lib (https://github.com/livelycode/aws-lib). So maybe we could re-use the base of the official SDK but retaining aws-lib's API.

This is really cool, but the terminology used could use a once over:

- "The SDK is available as an npm (Node Packaged Module)"

- "while keeping you from having to deal with threads, polling, timeouts, and event loops"

"npm" stands for "Node Package Manager", and Node.js definitely uses an event loop.

I'll definitely get some use out of this SDK though.

Contrary to the belief of many, "npm" is not in fact an abbreviation for "Node Package Manager". It is a recursive bacronymic abbreviation for "npm is not an acronym".

https://npmjs.org/doc/faq.html#If-npm-is-an-acronym-why-is-i...

I do my best to get this stuff right!

The top level of npmjs.org says "Node Packaged Modules."

What I was trying to say with regard to the event loop is that you don't have to write your own.

Let me know what you think of the SDK. The team loves feedback.

Great job, Jeff!

Overall, I'm happy to have official support from AWS. Are there any plans to support credentials via IAM roles? It looks like the two options right now are to set environment variables or read credentials from disk. I was just about to look into adding this capability to livelycode's aws-lib.

Open an issue for IAM roles in the GitHub issue tracker (http://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-js/issues). It seems like we want this, so opening an issue will give us all a better way to track the feature.

Do you accept pull requests? I've being maintaining my own node.js to AWS stuff for the last 18 months. I may know a thing, or two, about the AWS APIs.

We sure do! You can file bug reports and pull requests on http://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-js

Just because you are using an API which uses an event loop does not necessarily imply that you are personally dealing with event loops in any meaningful way.

At the moment I'm using https://github.com/appsattic/node-awssum It's fantastic and supports a billion services already, besides providing tons of useful examples. Before the AWS SDK matures, I don't think I'll be moving away from this library (even then I'm not sure).

What I don't like in this SDK it that it has its own promise thing. I just want to be able to write in a callback style, and IF I don't want that I can easily make my own abstractions. (more about this here: https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-js/issues/2 )

Another thing to be considered before making the "final" release would be to support more services: Route53, SNS, SES etc.

I'd like to see the addition a nice API for Amazon SQS.

Any specific reason why you need this? Can you explain the use case?

Thanks for hosting it on Github, Jeff. Waiting for more examples though (esp. for EC2).

What specific kinds of examples are you looking for? If we know, we can write better guide docs. You might want to open an issue on http://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-js/issues with suggestions-- guides are hosted there right now.

While I suppose this is good news... It also means I now get to recode my app off third party libraries so damnnit.

I don't think you need to do that at the moment, this is just a developer preview. Just wait and see how things evolve. At the moment https://github.com/appsattic/node-awssum still seems like a much much better SDK for AWS ;)

yeah actually i opted to stay on my current npm package.

looks like this requires specifying datatypes for each field in dynamo whereas my current one just lets me blindly dump objects.

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