PimgStack Part 2 - An AWS Dead End

With my Raspberry Pi set up I was ready to move on to the next step of my stack based digital photo-frame project, aka, PimgStack. I wanted to tackle the question of how the Pi would pick up messages from my phone, or really any source, telling it which stack operation to perform next. One strategy I'd used in the past was to depend on AWS's Simple Queue Service (SQS). My phone, and other entities, interested in manipulating the PimgStack would drop commands into an SQS queue, and the Raspberry Pi would perform a long-poll to pick up these directives.

The AWS command line tool appeared to support pulling items from an SQS queue. So the plan was simple: install the AWS command line tool on the Pi and write a wrapper script to pull commands from a queue. Easy peasy.

AWS CLI - Strike 1

I downloaded AWS CLI version 2 from Amazon, unpacked it and ran the 'aws' command. No dice, the binary wouldn't run. Apparently, the Pi architecture wasn't compatible with the binaries Amazon provides. Undeterred, I moved on to plan B: I'd install version 1 of the AWS command. That version is Python based, which should work on a Pi.

AWS CLI - Strike 2

I ran sudo pip install aws and patiently waited for the command to finish. Instead of being successful, I got an error. The interesting part was:

    arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc -pthread -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fno-strict-aliasing -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -fdebug-prefix-map=/build/python2.7-InigCj/python2.7-2.7.16=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fPIC -DUSE__THREAD -DHAVE_SYNC_SYNCHRONIZE -I/usr/include/ffi -I/usr/include/libffi -I/usr/include/python2.7 -c c/_cffi_backend.c -o build/temp.linux-armv7l-2.7/c/_cffi_backend.o
      c/_cffi_backend.c:15:10: fatal error: ffi.h: No such file or directory
       #include <ffi.h>
                ^~~~~~~
      compilation terminated.
      error: command 'arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc' failed with exit status 1

There were a number of recommendations for fixing this on web. Ultimately, I got around this error by insalling libffi-dev.

  sudo apt install -y libffi-dev

When aws was finally installed, I ran it and got this error:

$ aws ec2 help
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/aws", line 6, in <module>
    from aws.main import main
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aws/main.py", line 7, in <module>
    from fabric import api as fab
ImportError: cannot import name api

Turns out, I installed the wrong command altogether. 'aws' refers to a now defunct library. What I wanted to install was 'awscli':

$ sudo pip uninstall aws ; sudo pip install awscli

AWS CLI - Strike 3

I finally had the 'aws' command installed, but then ran into a new problem. Kicking off the 'aws' command took forever. And by forever, I mean over 4 seconds:

$ time aws
Note: AWS CLI version 2, the latest major version of the AWS CLI, is now stable and recommended for general use. For more information, see the AWS CLI version 2 installation instructions at: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/install-cliv2.html

usage: aws [options] <command> <subcommand> [<subcommand> ...] [parameters]
To see help text, you can run:

  aws help
  aws <command> help
  aws <command> <subcommand> help
aws: error: too few arguments

real    0m4.224s
user    0m3.611s
sys     0m0.612s

That's over 4 seconds to do nothing more than print out an error message.

This tells me that while my Raspberry Pi can technically run the aws command line utility, it's really not the right tool for the job. I needed to stop thinking like a programmer working on a general purpose system and start thinking like a programmer working in a resource-limited embedded environment.

So if AWS SQS wasn't the right tool, what was? I had a vague notation that MQTT might help. All I knew about MQTT was that it was used to pass messages to Internet-of-Things devices, may of which have far fewer resources than the Pi. Time to get schooled in MQTT.