I’m working with a new AWS account and I am moving to testing Boto3 to use the KMS service. I needed to make sure that the AWS account and secret keys were updated so ran aws configure to quickly update them.

I added the new keys and saw that default region was set to [Ireland] so accepted default and ran the following code

import boto3

s3 = boto3.resource('s3')
for bucket in s3.buckets.all():
print(bucket.name)

I was puzzled to get the following error;

botocore.vendored.requests.exceptions.ConnectionError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='s3.ireland.amazonaws.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: / (Caused by <class 'socket.gaierror'>: [Errno 8] nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

It didn’t sit right that the url had ireland in it explicitly when its generally the region code that is used with AWS so I went back the aws configure and set eu-west-1 as the default region.

On rerunning the code it all worked, so worth noting if this error comes up.