Max's Tech Blog

SimpleAWS Update

Update August 2022: I have decided to let this project go. I have very little use for it right now, beyond what I've already done. If somehow, that changes, I'll re-alive it, but consider it dead for now.

A while ago, I introduced a simple Python library called "SimpleAWS". SimpleAWS is designed to be a simplified way to interact with AWS resources with python. It requires Boto3 which I also wrote about a while ago. Boto3 is the Python SDK for AWS.

As I said in the README file for SimpleAWS: "Simplified Libraries for some of the most common AWS resources. The purpose of SimpleAWS is to add one layer of abstraction, and remove a lot of the guess-work from interfacing with some AWS resources. The options are limited on purpose - this is not designed to replace boto3, but to provide an easier entry into using AWS resources with python."

I have updated it a bit since I first introduced it. It originally only covered S3, SMS, SQS, and DynamoDB. It now also includes some functionality for CloudFront and EC2, and now includes a few useful CLI tools, such as an inventory tool, as well as a tool to create Cloudfront invalidations, which I find incredibly useful in my Pelican workflow.

It is on version 0.1.6. Version 0.1.7, which I hope to complete by the end of July, includes adding inventory functions for Glacier, ECS, Lambda, Route53, and RDS. It also hopefully will include some useful CLI functions and more detailed S3 and Glacier functions.

It's the only open source package I maintain. I moved it from GPLv3 to Mozilla Public License a while ago, largely because of my continued frustration with the very problematic Free Software Foundation.

I welcome contributions - I think there's been only one pull request (which I happily approved and integrated) since I released it. I originally wrote a lot of this code in the course of my work, as I was doing a lot with AWS. Now that I've retired from tech work, I don't really have a purpose for this other than I enjoy working with it.

Other articles

Methods of DNS Encryption

Published: Wed 08 January 2020
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

The "end-to-end" encryption wave is a great thing - securing the data moving between you and the websites you visit is important. However, one of the issues that presents itself, either when companies keeping track of what you are doing in order to more efficiently sell you things (surveillance capitalism), government …
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Tor, Part 4: Varied and Sundry

Published: Thu 24 October 2019
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

In this last part of my series on Tor (earlier posts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) I want to talk about SSL certificates for onion sites, onion hostname versions, and using Tor with Python.

SSL Certificates

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Tor, Part 3: Onion Services

Published: Wed 23 October 2019
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

In this part of my series on Tor (Part 1, Part 2,) I want to talk about how to spin up a dedicated onion service, set up a relay, and mine vanity onion addresses.

Onion Services

As I talked about in Part 2 you can pretty easily spin up an …
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Tor, Part 2: EOTK

Published: Tue 08 October 2019
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

OK, so now, after having read Part 1 you know something about how Tor works, and you've downloaded the browser, and looked around. So let's say you've already got a great website going, but you want to mirror it on the Tor network. How might you do that? As I'll …
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Tor, Part 1: The Basics

Published: Mon 07 October 2019
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In Code.

I've known about Tor and onions for quite a while now, but haven't really gotten a chance to dive into them until quite recently. Because I've now had a chance to dive in, I figured I should write some blog posts about what it is, what tools are out there …
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Static Site Workflow for Nonprofit Organizations

Published: Mon 06 May 2019
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

I co-wrote a two-part series of articles on static websites with my friend and colleague, John Kenyon. And it got me thinking - how could I build a good workflow for nonprofits to maintain static sites?

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NetSuite and Python

Published: Wed 20 February 2019
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

Sorry it's been a while since I've posted - but I'm working on a posting calendar, and hope to be much more regular in my posting.

I spent quite a bit of time recently, working on trying to get data to and from NetSuite using Python. There was so little information …
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Introducing Simple AWS

Published: Thu 20 September 2018
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

I've talked about Boto3 before. Boto3 is the main SDK that most people use to connect with AWS resources with python. Boto3 itself relies on Botocore, the lowest-level interface for AWS.

What I learned in the process of spending 2 years focused on AWS is that first, Boto3 is not …
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Boto3 for Simple Queue Service

Published: Mon 04 June 2018
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

There are a variety of ways python applications can talk to each other. APIs might be the most common way, but APIs have a fair bit of overhead - there has to be something there listening all the time. One other way is asychronous communication via a message broker.

I'd not …
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Boto3 for DynamoDB

Published: Mon 14 May 2018
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

As I described in my last post, Boto3 is the higher level SDK for AWS services. One of the services I've used quite a lot is DynamoDB. DynamoDB is a NoSQL key-value store. It's a little out of the scope of this blog entry to dive into details of DynamoDB …
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Introduction to Boto3, the AWS SDK for Python

Published: Tue 08 May 2018
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

Over the past year and a half, I have become very familar with boto3 which is the open-source SDK for Amazon's AWS resources. It's complicated in many ways, and, like AWS in general, there are always gotchas that will strike you when you least expect it. But it is a …
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Drupal 8 First Impressions

Published: Tue 24 April 2018
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In Code.

I took a break from Drupal development for about 2 years, and decided recently (largely for practical purposes) to dive back in. I had spent many years developing websites in Drupal - I started back in 2005 using Drupal 4.7, and I have developed websites on every version since, except …
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gspread vs. pygsheets

Published: Tue 16 January 2018
By Maxwell B. Pearl

In Code.

I'm doing a very cool project for OpenIssue, LLC, a company I have been connected to for a number of years. This project involves a lot of API work, including Salesforce, varied database systems, and lots of AWS resources. I expect during the course of this project to get to …
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Other articles

SSL Certificates

Onion Services

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