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

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.)