Preview release of AWS Resource APIs for .NET

We have released a preview of AWS Resource APIs for .NET, which is a brand new high-level API. The latest version of the preview ships with the resource APIs for the following AWS services, support for other services will be added in the near future.

• Amazon Glacier
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• AWS CloudFormation
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

The goal of this preview is to provide early access to the new API and to get feedback from you that we can incorporate in the GA release. The source code for the preview is available as a new branch of the aws-sdk-net GitHub repository, and the binaries are available here.

The resource APIs allows you to work more directly with the resources that are managed by AWS services. A resource is a logical object exposed by an AWS service’s API. For example, User, Group, and Role are some of the resources exposed by the IAM service. Here are the benefits of using the resource APIs :

Easy to understand

The low-level APIs are request-response style APIs that corresponds to the actions exposed by an AWS service. The resource APIs are  higher-level object-oriented APIs that represent the logical relationships between the resources within a service. When you work with a resource object, only the operations and relationships applicable to it are visible, in contrast to the low-level API where you can see all the operations for a service on the service client object. This makes it easier to understand and explore the features of a service.

Write less code

The resource APIs reduces the the amount of code you need to write to achieve the same results.

• Operations on resource objects infer identifier parameters from its current context. This allows you to write code where you don’t have to specify identifiers repeatedly.

  // No need to specify ResyncMFADeviceRequest.UserName 
  // as it is inferred from the user object
  user.Resync(new ResyncMFADeviceRequest
  {
      SerialNumber = "",
      AuthenticationCode1 ="",
      AuthenticationCode2 = ""
  };
  

  C#
• Simplified method overloads eliminate creating request objects for commonly used and mandatory request parameters. You can also use the overload, which accepts a request object for complex usages.

  group.AddUser(user.Name); // Use this simplified overload instead of  
  group.AddUser(new AddUserToGroupRequest { UserName = user.Name});  
  

  C#
• Auto pagination for operations that support paging – The resource APIs will make multiple service calls for APIs that support paging as you enumerate through the results. You do not have to write additional code to make multiple service calls and to capture/resend pagination tokens.

Using the API

The entry point for using the resource APIs is the service object. It represents an AWS service itself, in this case IAM. Using the service object, you can access top-level resources and operations on a service. Once you get the resource objects, further operations can be performed on them. The following code demonstrates various API usages with IAM and resource objects.

using Amazon.IdentityManagement.Model;
using Amazon.IdentityManagement.Resources; // Namespace for IAM resource APIs

...

// AWS credentials or profile is picked up from app.config 
var iam = new IdentityManagementService();            

// Get a group by its name
var adminGroup = iam.GetGroupByName("admins");

// List all users in the admins group.          
// GetUsers() calls an API that supports paging and 
// automatically makes multiple service calls if
// more results are available as we enumerate
// through the results.
foreach (var user in adminGroup.GetUsers())
{
    Console.WriteLine(user.Name);
}

// Create a new user and add the user to the admins group
var userA= iam.CreateUser("Alice");
adminGroup.AddUser(userA.Name);

// Create a new access key for a user
var userB = iam.GetUserByName("Bob");
var accessKey = userB.CreateAccessKey();

// Deactivate all MFA devices for a user
var userC = iam.GetUserByName("Charlie");
foreach (var mfaDevice in userC.GetMfaDevices())
{
    mfaDevice.Deactivate();
}

// Update an existing policy for a user
var policy = userC.GetUserPolicyByName("S3AccessPolicy");            
policy.Put(POLICY_DOCUMENT);

The AWS SDK for .NET Developer Guide has code examples and more information about the resource APIs. We would really like to hear your feedback and suggestions about this new API. You can provide your feedback through GitHub and the AWS forums.