Raison d’Être#

Long-running data pipelines, security tooling, ETL jobs, and cloud automation scripts frequently interact with the AWS API via boto3 — and often run into the same problem:

Temporary credentials expire.

When that happens, engineers typically fall back on one of two strategies:

  • Wrapping AWS calls in try/except blocks that catch ClientError exceptions

  • Writing ad hoc logic to refresh credentials using botocore.credentials internals

Both approaches are fragile, tedious to maintain, and error-prone at scale.

Over the years, I noticed that every company I worked for — whether a scrappy startup or FAANG — ended up with some variation of the same pattern: a small in-house module to manage credential refresh, written in haste, duplicated across services, and riddled with edge cases. Things only got more strange and difficult when I needed to run things in parallel.

Eventually, I decided to build boto3-refresh-session as a proper open-source Python package:

  • Fully tested

  • Extensible

  • Integrated with boto3 idioms

  • Equipped with automatic documentation and CI tooling

The goal: to solve a real, recurring problem once — cleanly, consistently, and for everyone – with multiple refresh strategies.

If you’ve ever written the same AWS credential-refresh boilerplate more than once, this library is for you.

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