There is Erlang library that does that already. Maybe it could be improved to support pluggable HTTP clients and stuff like that.
EDIT:
It seems that it also has Elixir implementation. Additionally there is erlcloud which also seems pretty active. You could point to these libraries as a potential replacements.
Do you have any recommendations on potential replacements that are already developed or partially developed?
Right now one of the most popular file upload libraries for Phoenix (Waffle) depends on ExAws for saving files to S3. I wonder if the author of that library is on the forums. It’s a pretty big hit to lose that library since file uploads (especially to S3) is so popular.
Is it possible in your opinion (of course it is, but without too much hoops and headaches) to make calls directly to the AWS API without ExAWS? Is this something you would recommend?
While implementing S3 uploads, I was able to forgo using Waffle and while doing so wondered if I could do without ExAws?
I lot of times with Elixir I find that I can do things without libraries (as opposed to JS which seems to need NPM install for the most minute things). I like this approach.
There are several aspects about interacting with AWS that are difficult to do without a library:
Request signing. This is the big one. ExAws has several hundred lines of code dedicated to formatting and signing the parameters according to the AWS signing guidelines. Without this, you can’t make any requests to any AWS service. Copying and pasting these lines into each application or library that wants to talk to AWS is super error prone, since any bug fixes or updates to that code won’t be distributed.
Credential management. AWS credentials need to be retrieved via several different mechanisms, and people depend on that working the same way across various services and languages.
Those are really the big ones. There are other benefits to a dedicated library, like handling header boilerplate, or various convenience functions around clunky APIs, but doing AWS request signing and credential management without the help of a library is likely to result in bugs.
That said, perhaps those bits could be extracted (or maybe already exist) as their own library.
I assume you tried some approaches which didn’t work out. Would you like to shed some light on what you tried and why it didn’t work out?
I saw ExAws in a separate thread. I’m a newbie to elixir; I’ve a small application in production and I’m reading a lot as well. I would like to know if I can be off any help. I’m sure with a bit of guidance and code review I can contribute my quota to the elixir ecosystem. I really love the language and would be glad if I can contribute. Thank you.
Hey everyone.
I really do appreciate the outpouring of support. If all that was needed to move forward with the library was willing and helpful people then the project would be in great hands.
However what the community really needs is someone who has the time and vision to re-imagine how to do an AWS client from the ground up. ExAws’s approach places far too high a burden on maintainers to keep everything up to date.
CargoSense has officially moved off of AWS to GCP, which seems like the right time to declare what is already true: ExAws is deprecated and will not receive further updates.
https://github.com/ex-aws/ex_aws#deprecation-notice
Thanks to all of you who have put time and effort into it over the years. I’m sure the next library will benefit from that same interest and passion.
Updating this thread to acknowledge that someone stepped up as maintainer: Remove deprecation notice · ex-aws/ex_aws@2dff9bc · GitHub
