What is an SDK?

Right behind the term API, it seems like all we hear about is SDKs these days! But what is a Software Development Kit and why do we care? Well, read on my friend…

Let’s say you have just developed a new killer cloud-based solution. Your amazing new service offering features APIs and support for a wide variety of programming languages for scripting actions within your web application.

How do you educate the many customers you will have that want to customize and automate their work with your site? You guessed it! You build them an SDK that contains all the tools and instructions they will need to successfully code against your application.

What is typical to find in these useful kits? Well, just to name a few:

• Libraries
• APIs
• Documentation
• Tools
• Sample code
• Workflows

Some SDKs even provide an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to enable you to build error free code.

Of course the benefits provided by SDKs abound. You are going to be off and running so much quicker when it comes to efficiently working with the remote system or service. You should also be able to increase security and reliability by following the recommended best practices of the app developer. SDKs are the way to go!

Check out some of these SDK examples to solidify your learning! Notice I am targeting SDKs for someone that is skilled in Python and wants to put those skills to great work against these amazing vendor products!

Cisco APIC Python SDK
https://cobra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

AWS SDK for Python (boto3)
https://aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-python/

Meraki Python SDK
https://github.com/meraki/meraki-python-sdk