AWS SDK

AWS SDK#

The python SKD for AWS is the boto3 package. This page covers the details of working with the boto3 package.

import moto
import boto3
from pprint import pprint

Moto#

Moto enables the behaviour of AWS services to be mocked.

The following code creates an s3 client and attemnts to list available buckets.

s3 = boto3.client("s3", region_name="us-west-2")

try:
    s3.list_buckets()
except Exception as e:
    print(e)

Unable to locate credentials

The result there is an error message indicating that there are no AWS credentials have been provided.

The following cell uses the same boto3 code wrapped by the moto mock.

mock = moto.mock_aws()
mock.start()

s3 = boto3.client("s3", region_name="us-west-2")
pprint(s3.list_buckets())

mock.stop()

{'Buckets': [],
 'Owner': {'DisplayName': 'webfile', 'ID': 'bcaf1ffd86f41161ca5fb16fd081034f'},
 'ResponseMetadata': {'HTTPHeaders': {'content-type': 'application/xml',
                                      'x-amzn-requestid': 'tzN0rrlVDe1F4epGGP0GictXAyeEdVvaFkcoMC97KHZ3sZqlrJ8p'},
                      'HTTPStatusCode': 200,
                      'RequestId': 'tzN0rrlVDe1F4epGGP0GictXAyeEdVvaFkcoMC97KHZ3sZqlrJ8p',
                      'RetryAttempts': 0}}

The result the is some kind of AWS answer.

The following cell shows an example of creating a bucket (some-bucket), listing it and deleteting it. Moto somehow retains information about the behaviour of the bucket.

with moto.mock_aws():
    region = "us-west-2"
    bucket_name = "some-bucket"

    s3 = boto3.client("s3", region_name=region)

    location = {'LocationConstraint': region}
    s3.create_bucket(
        Bucket=bucket_name,
        CreateBucketConfiguration=location
    )

    pprint(s3.list_buckets()["Buckets"])

    s3.delete_bucket(Bucket=bucket_name)

[{'CreationDate': datetime.datetime(2025, 10, 20, 12, 8, 15, tzinfo=tzutc()),
  'Name': 'some-bucket'}]

Services names#

Boto provides access to the services thorugh its abstractions: client, resources etc. You usually have to specify to which service you want to access using a special shortcut. You can get a list of shortcuts from the boto3.session.Session().get_available_services() method.

As there is a huge amount of services awailable in AWS, the following table lists the most imporant for me with a short description:

Group

Shortcut

Description

s3

S3 storage

iam

Identity and Access Management - managing users and permissions

dynamodb

Dynamo database

lambda

Lambda functions

bedrock

bedrock

Core Amazon Bedrock service for managing foundation models and configurations.

bedrock-runtime

Runtime APIs for invoking and generating responses from Bedrock models.

bedrock-agent

Control APIs for creating and managing Bedrock AI agents and their resources.

bedrock-agent-runtime

Runtime APIs for invoking Bedrock agents and retrieving their outputs.

bedrock-agentcore

Platform for building and running advanced AI agents with memory and tools.

bedrock-agentcore-control

Control-plane APIs for configuring AgentCore components and deployments.

bedrock-data-automation

Service for automating data processing and transformation workflows.

bedrock-data-automation-runtime

Runtime APIs for executing and monitoring data automation tasks.

openserach

opensearch

Opensearch database.

opensearchserverless

Serverless opensearch databse.

Check the Available Services page in the boto3 documentation for description of the services.

The following cell gets a list of the available services prints their amount and prints a few of them.

with moto.mock_aws():
    session = boto3.session.Session()
    services = session.get_available_services()

print(len(services))
for s in services[:20]:
    print(s)

413
accessanalyzer
account
acm
acm-pca
aiops
amp
amplify
amplifybackend
amplifyuibuilder
apigateway
apigatewaymanagementapi
apigatewayv2
appconfig
appconfigdata
appfabric
appflow
appintegrations
application-autoscaling
application-insights
application-signals

Client#

The client provides a low-level, 1:1 access to the AWS services.

Create client through boto3.client method.

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