aws/aws-sdk-ruby

The AWS SDK for Ruby is the official library from Amazon for using AWS cloud services in Ruby applications. If you are writing a Ruby application and need to interact with Amazon S3 (file storage), EC2 (virtual servers), DynamoDB, SQS, or any of the hundreds of other AWS services, this library is the standard way to do it. The SDK is structured as a collection of separate Ruby gems (packages), one per AWS service. Instead of installing a single enormous package for everything, you add only the gems for the services your application actually uses. For example, you would add aws-sdk-s3 for file storage or aws-sdk-ec2 for managing virtual machines. This approach keeps your application lightweight. Before making any API calls, you configure two things: your AWS credentials (the access key and secret that prove who you are) and your region (which data center to talk to, such as us-east-1). The SDK looks for these automatically in several standard locations: environment variables, the shared credentials file at ~/.aws/credentials, or from the server's instance profile if your code is running inside AWS itself. Keeping credentials out of your source code and in environment variables or configuration files is strongly recommended. Once configured, you create a client object for the service you want and call methods on it. Each method corresponds directly to one AWS API operation. Responses come back as structured Ruby objects with typed fields rather than raw JSON strings you have to parse yourself. The SDK also includes built-in support for automatically fetching the next page of results when a response is paginated, and for waiting until a resource reaches a desired state (such as waiting until a new virtual server has fully started before continuing). This is version 3 of the SDK, which introduced the modular per-service gem structure. The full README is longer than what was shown.