AWS from the command line

If you are reading this post, nearly for sure, you have an AWS account.
The most default way to interact with the AWS products is over the Web AWS console, which is reachable over https://signin.aws.amazon.com

There are some other ways to access your AWS products like EC2 or S3 over the command line from any system or distribution of your choice.

So how to interact with you AWS from the command line?
Install Official Amazon AWS command-line interface on your system:

# OS X
brew install awscli

# Debian like systems
apt-get install awscli

# openSUSE
zypper in aws-cli

You must specify your AWS Access Key ID, AWS Secret Access Key
and optional your region by running “aws configure“.

The AWS Key ID and AWS Secret Access Key can be created in the IAM section of your AWS account: https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/

If your are running a single account without any groups or users,
you can add your Access keys over the “Your Security Credentials” section on the right side from a drop down of your account-name.

As a best practice, Amazon recommend creating an IAM user that has access keys rather than relying on root access keys. So – as You Like it.

Now you are ready to interact with your AWS account from your command line and can use fancy commands to manage your AWS services.

aws ec2 describe-instances
aws ec2 stop-instances --instance-ids i-04090cd4c8f6d8ccf
aws ec2 terminate-instances --instance-ids i-04090cd4c8f6d8ccf

If you think, storing of your AWS Key ID and AWS Secret on some machine can be dangerous.
Roles are more secure than storing your access key and secret access key on some machines.
In easy steps by clicking on your EC2 instance Settings, you can “Attach/Replace IAM Role” to your instance of your choice and interact with the AWS CLI from a AWS EC2 instance. Be aware, if someone gains access to that system, the interaction with your AWS-account will be possible…