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Introducing the AWS Command Line Interface (Developer Preview)

69 points by DanielRibeiro 14y ago

xorgar831 14y ago
One thing I never liked about the current cli tools is that their output was not easily passed into other cli commands. Quite annoying to get a screen full of tabulated text and multli-line fields, when all you need a list of instance ids.
idunno246 14y ago
About time. Was a mess downloading them all, especially since they each had different environment variables for auth and such
- samstokes 14y ago
  I'd be glad to see the old CLI tools die, because the damn things had to boot up a JVM for every invocation. Among other things, that made CloudWatch very hard to use from a t1.micro or m1.small instance: each call to PutMetricData used enough CPU to start the instance being throttled. (On a t1.micro I couldn't even post to CloudWatch once per minute: the throttled calls would take longer than a minute and start to overlap, exhausting the available RAM.)
yRetsyM 14y ago
Interestingly it's a wrapper around the community maintained botocore[1]. It's listed in the requirements file[2] 1: https://github.com/boto/botocore https://github.com/boto/botocore 2: https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/develop/requirements.txt https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/develop/requirements.txt
- yRetsyM 14y ago
  I stand corrected, it now seems that the lead developer of botocore works at amazon now: http://www.elastician.com/2011/12/looking-at-clouds-from-both-sides-now.html http://www.elastician.com/2011/12/looking-at-clouds-from-bot...
amalag 14y ago
The best tool was Tim Kay's perl aws script: http://timkay.com/aws/ http://timkay.com/aws/
bkirkbri 14y ago
Here's hoping that they add support for S3 soon. It's a shame that it's so difficult to leverage IAM Roles to bootstrap an instance. The very latest boto is the only tool I know of that supports S3 fetching using the STS credentials that you get from a Role.
akoumjian 14y ago
Hell yes. It will be really great to experience some consistency around aws api calls with a single cli experience. I love the boto project, but both the class structure and sporadic cli tools in the project take inputs in a non-uniform way that can be quite frustrating at times. I'm really glad they went with Python on this one with the Apache license. This will definitely encourage a lot of active community contributions.
agreemensch 14y ago
It will be nice to ditch openjdk. It's a massive install just to get the reliability of the "official" AWS command line functions. Would be nice to ditch Python too. Imagine if netcat and a basic UNIX userland were all that's needed. But, beggars can't be choosers.
- amalag 14y ago
  Checkout timkay's perl scripts: http://timkay.com/aws/ http://timkay.com/aws/
jakozaur 14y ago
Just tried it. Seems much better than previous scripts, but I need: S3 support bash autocompletion suggestion for misspelled commands
- bkirkbri 14y ago
  Bash autocompletion is included, though I haven't tested it yet.
DrJ 14y ago
i achieve most of this with Boto + iPython.

69 points by DanielRibeiro 14y ago

One thing I never liked about the current cli tools is that their output was not easily passed into other cli commands. Quite annoying to get a screen full of tabulated text and multli-line fields, when all you need a list of instance ids.

idunno246 14y ago

About time. Was a mess downloading them all, especially since they each had different environment variables for auth and such

samstokes 14y ago
I'd be glad to see the old CLI tools die, because the damn things had to boot up a JVM for every invocation. Among other things, that made CloudWatch very hard to use from a t1.micro or m1.small instance: each call to PutMetricData used enough CPU to start the instance being throttled. (On a t1.micro I couldn't even post to CloudWatch once per minute: the throttled calls would take longer than a minute and start to overlap, exhausting the available RAM.)

yRetsyM 14y ago

Interestingly it's a wrapper around the community maintained botocore[1]. It's listed in the requirements file[2] 1: https://github.com/boto/botocore https://github.com/boto/botocore 2: https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/develop/requirements.txt https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/develop/requirements.txt

yRetsyM 14y ago
I stand corrected, it now seems that the lead developer of botocore works at amazon now: http://www.elastician.com/2011/12/looking-at-clouds-from-both-sides-now.html http://www.elastician.com/2011/12/looking-at-clouds-from-bot...

amalag 14y ago

The best tool was Tim Kay's perl aws script: http://timkay.com/aws/ http://timkay.com/aws/

bkirkbri 14y ago

Here's hoping that they add support for S3 soon. It's a shame that it's so difficult to leverage IAM Roles to bootstrap an instance. The very latest boto is the only tool I know of that supports S3 fetching using the STS credentials that you get from a Role.

akoumjian 14y ago

Hell yes. It will be really great to experience some consistency around aws api calls with a single cli experience. I love the boto project, but both the class structure and sporadic cli tools in the project take inputs in a non-uniform way that can be quite frustrating at times. I'm really glad they went with Python on this one with the Apache license. This will definitely encourage a lot of active community contributions.

agreemensch 14y ago

It will be nice to ditch openjdk. It's a massive install just to get the reliability of the "official" AWS command line functions. Would be nice to ditch Python too. Imagine if netcat and a basic UNIX userland were all that's needed. But, beggars can't be choosers.

amalag 14y ago
Checkout timkay's perl scripts: http://timkay.com/aws/ http://timkay.com/aws/

jakozaur 14y ago

Just tried it. Seems much better than previous scripts, but I need: S3 support bash autocompletion suggestion for misspelled commands

bkirkbri 14y ago
Bash autocompletion is included, though I haven't tested it yet.

DrJ 14y ago

i achieve most of this with Boto + iPython.