An Introduction to boto’s Support interface

This tutorial focuses on the boto interface to Amazon Web Services Support, allowing you to programmatically interact with cases created with Support. This tutorial assumes that you have already downloaded and installed boto.

Creating a Connection

The first step in accessing Support is to create a connection to the service. There are two ways to do this in boto. The first is:

>>> from boto.support.connection import SupportConnection
>>> conn = SupportConnection('<aws access key>', '<aws secret key>')

At this point the variable conn will point to a SupportConnection object. In this example, the AWS access key and AWS secret key are passed in to the method explicitly. Alternatively, you can set the environment variables:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID

Your AWS Access Key ID

AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Your AWS Secret Access Key

and then call the constructor without any arguments, like this:

>>> conn = SupportConnection()

There is also a shortcut function in boto that makes it easy to create Support connections:

>>> import boto.support
>>> conn = boto.support.connect_to_region('us-west-2')

In either case, conn points to a SupportConnection object which we will use throughout the remainder of this tutorial.

Describing Existing Cases

If you have existing cases or want to fetch cases in the future, you’ll use the SupportConnection.describe_cases method. For example:

>>> cases = conn.describe_cases()
>>> len(cases['cases'])
1
>>> cases['cases'][0]['title']
'A test case.'
>>> cases['cases'][0]['caseId']
'case-...'

You can also fetch a set of cases (or single case) by providing a case_id_list parameter:

>>> cases = conn.describe_cases(case_id_list=['case-1'])
>>> len(cases['cases'])
1
>>> cases['cases'][0]['title']
'A test case.'
>>> cases['cases'][0]['caseId']
'case-...'

Describing Service Codes

In order to create a new case, you’ll need to fetch the service (& category) codes available to you. Fetching them is a simple call to:

>>> services = conn.describe_services()
>>> services['services'][0]['code']
'amazon-cloudsearch'

If you only care about certain services, you can pass a list of service codes:

>>> service_details = conn.describe_services(service_code_list=[
...     'amazon-cloudsearch',
...     'amazon-dynamodb',
... ])

Describing Severity Levels

In order to create a new case, you’ll also need to fetch the severity levels available to you. Fetching them looks like:

>>> severities = conn.describe_severity_levels()
>>> severities['severityLevels'][0]['code']
'low'

Creating a Case

Upon creating a connection to Support, you can now work with existing Support cases, create new cases or resolve them. We’ll start with creating a new case:

>>> new_case = conn.create_case(
...     subject='This is a test case.',
...     service_code='',
...     category_code='',
...     communication_body="",
...     severity_code='low'
... )
>>> new_case['caseId']
'case-...'

For the service_code/category_code parameters, you’ll need to do a SupportConnection.describe_services call, then select the appropriate service code (& appropriate category code within that service) from the response.

For the severity_code parameter, you’ll need to do a SupportConnection.describe_severity_levels call, then select the appropriate severity code from the response.

Adding to a Case

Since the purpose of a support case involves back-and-forth communication, you can add additional communication to the case as well. Providing a response might look like:

>>> result = conn.add_communication_to_case(
...     communication_body="This is a followup. It's working now."
...     case_id='case-...'
... )

Fetching all Communications for a Case

Getting all communications for a given case looks like:

>>> communications = conn.describe_communications('case-...')

Resolving a Case

Once a case is finished, you should mark it as resolved to close it out. Resolving a case looks like:

>>> closed = conn.resolve_case(case_id='case-...')
>>> closed['result']
True