Amazon releases preview of command line for cloud services

Amazon has released a developer preview of a command line interface for the Amazon Web Services cloud. The CLI, once configured, can control a range of services provided by AWS; the initial release includes command line support for EC2, Auto Scaling, Elastic Beanstalk, Load Balancing, RDS, IAM, CloudWatch and the Simple Queue, Notification and Email Services (SQS, SNS, SES).

An example of a command which could be issued for EC2 is included in the, somewhat limited, documentation which covers configuration and using the CLI:

aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-554ac83c --min-count 1 --max-count 1
         --key-name MyKeyPair --security-groups MySecurityGroup

This command would launch a single EC2 instance using a specific AMI (a Windows Server 2012 image). It returns a JSON formatted response of all the details for the group; Amazon suggests the jq tool would be useful for parsing responses.

The Amazon CLI is designed to be extendible to support other services and part of the goal for the developer preview is to establish priorities on which services should be supported next. The Apache 2.0 licensed project is available from GitHub. It requires Python 2.6.x to 3.3.x and can also be installed using easy_install or pip; instructions for that can be found in the GitHub repository's README file.

(djwm)