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General Availability of the AWS SDK for Rust | Better HN

General Availability of the AWS SDK for Rust (opens in new tab)

(aws.amazon.com)

161 pointsCathalMullan2y ago60 comments

60 comments

rusbus2y ago

Hello! Me and some other folks who work on the Rust SDK will be around today answering questions in the comments.

No questions from me, just some appreciation and thanks for the release. While it is clearly not founded solely on the pure and selfless love of AWS for Rust, it is nevertheless very positive for the language to have good stable ways to work with major platforms. Writing things on AWS in Rust is now a significantly easier sell.

Thanks for all the work on this, looking forward to trying a few new pieces out!

belter2y ago

Thanks for showing up and answering questions. Congratulations on the release.

What kind of plans for support of Rust's evolving async ecosystem?

Any particular reason why the public roadmap does not show the columns similar to "Researching", "We're Working On It" like the other similar public AWS Roadmaps? See example for Containers: https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap/projects/1

Would be nice to have fully working examples on Github, for most common scenarios across most AWS services. This is something that historically AWS SDKs have been inconsistent on. Just a request not really a question :-)

rusbus2y ago

> What kind of plans for support of Rust's evolving async ecosystem?

We were hoping async-function-in-trait would land before GA, however, we have a plan to add support in a backwards compatible way when it's released.

> Any particular reason why the public roadmap does not show the columns similar to "Researching", "We're Working On It" like the other similar public AWS Roadmaps?

Our roadmap has unfortunately been in a state of disrepair for some time. We're hoping to get it cleaned up and accurate post GA.

> Would be nice to have fully working examples on Github, for most common scenarios across most AWS services. This is something that historically AWS SDKs have been inconsistent on. Just a request not really a question :-)

There are lots of examples here [1], some simple, some quite complex. If there's something you have in mind, please file an issue! Having great examples is one of our priorities.

[1]: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sdk-rust/tree/main/examples

digitalsanctum2y ago

The blog post mentions support for 300+ services. I have a couple of questions:

1. It would be interesting to see a comparison between the Rust service coverage and other language SDKs that have been around for a while such as Java. Is there such a place to see this comparison? 2. Will the Rust SDK stay up to date with the latest services as they're announced?

I'm very excited to see this announcement. It's been a long time coming.

rusbus2y ago

The Rust SDK is built on top of the smithy-rs code generator. On the service coverage front, you'll find nearly 100% parity—There are some legacy APIs that aren't supported. It also doesn't have many "high level libraries" (e.g. S3 transfer manager) that can find for other languages.

New services will come out the same day as all other SDKs–All SDKs utilize the same automated system to deploy new releases.

The only exception is services which require extensive custom code. We're still catching up on those for the Rust SDK.

ibotty2y ago

Disclaimer: I am not working on the SDK nor for Amazon.

As far as I read the code of some AWS SDKs, the SDKs (in most languages) are generated from interface files and are thus always in-sync and cover the same APIs in every language.

Are there any plans to do the same for CDK?

anentropic2y ago

Yes, it'd be nice to have a CDK based on Rust with ergonomic libs for downstream langs derived from that via FFI (e.g. Python/PyO3) instead of the JSII abomination they ended up with

I don't hold my breath

necubi2y ago

Thanks for your work on this!

Are there plans to improve the compilation times? Aws sdk crates are some of the slowest dependencies in our build—which feels odd for what are basically wrappers for http clients.

rusbus2y ago

It's on our radar—one of the biggest issues is that some of the services like EC2 are absolutely massive. We're investigating ways for customers to only compile the operations they need, etc.

iofiiiiiiiii2y ago

What are the differences in the design principles of the AWS Rust SDK compared to AWS SDKs of other languages? In what ways is it special to work best with the Rust ecosystem?

rusbus2y ago

Probably the biggest one is "batteries included but replaceable." The Rust ecosystem is still maturing, so we did a lot of work to make reasonable default choices but still allow customers to make different ones.

Some of our other design tenets are here: https://smithy-lang.github.io/smithy-rs/design/tenets.html

csomar2y ago

Will there be any support for Wasm as a target for compilation?

rusbus2y ago

Yep! There are actually examples that use Web Assembly: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sdk-rust/tree/main/examples/w...

jupp0r2y ago

Why would this be specific to the SDK? If the code is Rust without any native libraries being linked, WASM should work out of the box.

kitplummer2y ago

Curious about FIPS compliance of the crypto modules, any insight?

kristianpaul2y ago

Is cdk rust on the works?

cebert2y ago

I attended a re:Invent session yesterday on using Rust as a Lambda runtime. The potential performance improvements, especially with limited memory, was quite compelling. I’m looking forward to trying this SDK out with Rust Lambdas.

At my company we’ve written all of our Lambda functions in Rust. It’s a perfect fit with the constraints in Lambda. We did customize the runtime somewhat for our needs but that wasn’t all that complicated.

Joeboy2y ago

I realize this is a "how long is a piece of string" question, but I'm wondering what cost benefits you might realistically see from moving lambdas from Python to a faster language like Rust? You pay (partly) for execution time so I guess you should see some savings, but I'm wondering how that works out in practice. Worth it?

steveklabnik2y ago

Here's a fun answer to that question: Rubygems saved infinity money. That is, they got resource usage down to the point where they could move to the free tier.

* https://andre.arko.net/2018/10/25/parsing-logs-230x-faster-w...

* https://andre.arko.net/2019/01/11/parsing-logs-faster-with-r...

(obviously most people will not realize infinity money)

This paper is not about lambdas and their typical operations specifically, but it shows that across a variety of tasks, as of 2017, Rust is more environmentally friendly than Python.

https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/pap...

steveklabnik2y ago

I am gonna be honest: I hope this paper never gets cited by anyone, ever. There's a number of very weird issues about it, but I don't think what it actually shows is demonstrative of reality, even if it happens to show Rust in a good light.

Matthias2472y ago

Instrument your python code and gather metrics. Maybe use a profiler. If it is heavily CPU limited and it spends all time in python interpreter calls it might benefit from moving to a more efficient language. It it’s mostly waiting on IO (eg remote services) it might be a negligible difference.

ethagnawl2y ago

I'm a Rust beginner, so please excuse any naivete herein: Does this SDK _necessarily_ require an async runtime or is it possible to use it in a traditional sync application using whatever extra facilities (e.g. block_on) which would be required to "normalize" it?

ursuscamp2y ago

You can use tokio’s block_on to sync-ify. You need to instantiate a runtime, but you don’t need to do run your whole application in it, just the Future.

edit: Tokio can be beefy. You might look at some of the smaller single-threaded runtimes to execute your future in the main application thread if you’re only concerned about serial execution.

ethagnawl2y ago

Thanks. To further clarify, the SDK can be used from within a Tokio runtime or using Tokio's facilities in a synchronous runtime. Can other async runtimes be used? (The linked post seems to imply that they can.) It looks like Tokio gets installed as a dependency and I see the following when trying to use the futures package:

> thread 'main' panicked at /home/dev/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f/aws-smithy-async-1.0.2/src/rt/sleep.rs:128:20: there is no reactor running, must be called from the context of a Tokio 1.x runtime

jon_richards2y ago

One thing I love about block_on is that it has a dedicated threadpool with a ton of threads. For async code, you want around as many threads as cores so the thread can run at full speed and have the scheduler handle switching, but for block_on, most of the time is sleeping, so the core can just switch between them all and take care of any that are done sleeping. Just don't use it for CPU intensive tasks.

Hi! Congratulations on GA! Been waiting for this.

I just heard about AWS CRT at the AWS ReInvent Innovation talk on Storage.

1. Does the Rust SDK use CRT under the hood? I use the Rust SDK to access S3 and wonder if there are any automatic performance gains?

2. I couldn't find good material on how AWS CRT works and how it is integrated with the Java or Python S3 connectors. I would appreciate a more technical explanation. Do you have any links that explains this in more depth?

rusbus2y ago

The Rust SDK does not currently use the CRT under the hood. The CRT is a high performance C-Library for fast HTTP connections (and a lot more).

For S3, there is a meta-layer that interceps requests to S3 and converts them into ranged-gets and multipart uploads for parallelization.

It's quite complex and can also use significantly more memory, but it does allow for *much* faster uploads and downloads in some circumstances.

insanitybit2y ago

Huge. I've told people before that the SDK was basically stable, but the fact that it wasn't 1.0 was still concerning for them.

jon_richards2y ago

To be fair, seeing the big "DO NOT USE IN PRODUCTION" every time you view the docs doesn't inspire confidence, lol

jon_richards2y ago

I've been testing this for a while!

One thing I sorely missed was workers for consuming SQS messages. Ended up having an intern adapt a worker for the old community AWS SDK (rusoto) into this: https://github.com/Landeed/sqs_worker

Also on my dream list of features: gRPC support for Lambda.

nailer2y ago

Hah that reminds me of a decade or so ago - there was an entire unofficial node SDK before the official one came out. The unofficial one still supported a bunch of features outside the main one for a while.

Aeolun2y ago

Sounds like that must have been an absolute bitch to build. I cannot imagine re-implementing 300 existing API’s for Rust from scratch…

On the plus side, I guess the work lends itself well to parallelization.

A good chunk of the AWS SDKs are codegen’d - it’s the only possible way to support the sheer volume of stuff they need.

jamesfinlayson2y ago

Agreed - the Java SDK v2 has had 20 updates this month alone (sometimes two or three times in one day) so definitely not much in the way of manual updates.

andrewaylett2y ago

As with all the other AWS SDKs, the bulk of the code is generated. The JSON service definitions are shared, the effort (one expects) is in being adding support for all the different ways in which the JSON indicates that services behave, and making it look like it could have been hand-written.

say_it_as_it_is2y ago

What are some valid reasons why people wouldn't now use these rust libraries and extend them to their preferred language? Maintaining clients is tedious work and prone to abandonment.

ufmace2y ago

I would expect AWS to provide custom libraries for basically every language. The cost of a few full-time engineers who are experts at any reasonably popular language is probably pocket change compared to how much even a few companies using that language might spend on AWS services.

rusbus2y ago

Not all languages have a great interop story with Rust. Binding the JNI is especially tricky, for example. Furthermore, when performance isn't important, the need to package and compile Rust code may be an unnecessary hassle.

Black boxes tend to be problematic to debug and if you're wrapping code in a language you don't know then it's a black box.

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