"Avoid the horrible AWS GUIs" Say what ? "What have you guys chosen to do?" If you are making heavy use of the AWS GUI for any aspect of AWS then You're Not

"Avoid the horrible AWS GUIs" Say what ? "What have you guys chosen to do?" If you are making heavy use of the AWS GUI for any aspect of AWS then You're Not Doing it Right (TM). Use the AWS SDKs, or if you don't like the SDKs, the APIs. Hell, if you can't be bothered to program against the SDKs or APIs, then just make naïve shell script calls against the AWS CLI for your platform. That's what all the native tools Amazon gives you are there for. No need to add un-necessary layers of third-party abstraction, which, above anything else, is a vast potential security risk. RTFM as the cool kids say. ;-)