The AWS Developers Podcast Behind the Scenes of AWS SDK Development
Apr 11, 2025
In this engaging discussion, Trevor Rowe, Senior Manager of the AWS SDK team, shares insights into the evolution of AWS SDKs and their support for over 320 services across 13 programming languages. He explains the challenges of backward compatibility and the importance of maintaining a smooth developer experience. Rowe highlights the innovative use of Smithy for code generation, modular architecture advancements, and performance enhancements that simplify migrations. The conversation also touches on the collaboration between SDKs and the Amplify framework, fostering improved usability in cloud application development.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
AWS SDKs Scale and Language Support
- AWS SDKs provide low-level clients to access all AWS services across multiple languages.
- They support more than 320 services and 14,000 API operations in 13 different programming languages.
Trevor's Ruby SDK Experience
- Trevor Rowe was hired to work on the Ruby SDK, which was one of the earlier AWS SDKs.
- The SDK family grew from the early SDKs in.NET, Java, PHP, and Ruby to 13 languages today.
Automating SDK Generation at Scale
- AWS SDKs now generate around 1,500 API updates annually due to the high number of services.
- Automation and Smithy enable scaling SDK generation efficiently instead of manual SDK updates.