Native AWS SDK Integrations

What is AWS SDK?

Since September 2021, there was no support for native AWS SDK integrations in Step Functions. AWS SDKs (Software Development Kits) allow us to integrate AWS Step Functions with various programming languages, making it easy to create, manage, and execute state machines programmatically. AWS provides SDKs for popular languages like Python, JavaScript, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, and Go.

Using AWS SDKs, we can easily integrate AWS services into our applications, making it possible to manage AWS resources, call AWS service APIs, and automate various tasks without having to use the AWS Management Console or other manual processes. Here are some examples of AWS SDK:

• AWS SDK for Java

• AWS SDK for .NET

• AWS SDK for PHP

• AWS SDK for JavaScript (Browser and Node.js versions)

• AWS SDK for Ruby

• AWS SDK for Python (Boto3)

• AWS SDK for Go

• AWS SDK for C++

• AWS SDK for Rust

Each SDK includes the following components:

• API clients: These are the primary components that we'll use to interact with AWS services. API clients provide methods for making requests to AWS service APIs, handling authentication, error handling, and request/response processing.

• AWS service models: Service models define the structure of API requests and responses for each AWS service. These models enable the SDK to correctly serialize and deserialize API requests and responses.

• Credentials management: AWS SDKs include tools for managing and securely storing our AWS access keys, which are necessary for making authenticated requests to AWS services.

• Configuration and customization: SDKs provide options for configuring various aspects of the library, such as request retries, timeouts, and regional settings.

• Documentation and examples: Each SDK comes with documentation and example code to help us get started quickly and understand how to use the SDK effectively.

Within AWS Step Functions, we can use Lambda functions to integrate with other AWS services.

Example

In this lesson, we will not implement native SDK integrations but just focus on understanding them. We will practice it in the next lessons. Let's assume in the following example, we have a Lambda function that uses aws-sdk to communicate with DynamoDB and creates a record in the database. It's a Task state in the AWS Step Functions.