A decade of AWS CLI

AWS CLI was launched in developer preview in late December 2012

The announcement post from 2012 says (excerpt):

We are excited to release a developer preview of the AWS Command Line Interface, a new unified tool to manage your AWS services. With just one tool to download and configure, you will be able to control multiple AWS services from the command line and automate them through scripts. This first release supports 12 services, including Amazon EC2, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon SQS, and Amazon SNS, with upcoming support for others. Since this is a developer preview, we are also looking for feedback from the community to help shape its design.

From a modest beginning of supporting just a dozen services, we now know the AWS CLI as the essential tool for any serious AWS developer or administrator – supporting virtually every single service and action.

AWS CLI V2 was launched around 3 years ago. In these 7 years the CLI had become much more pwervasive and powerful.

The AWS Management Console itself was launched only a few years earlier in 2009 (14 years ago now).

Sure there are a lot of things to complain about like the inconsistencies between the flags and output formats between various services. But that has not stopped widespread adoption and even third-party and community extensions or alternatives to the native CLI. Some people compared the offerings from various cloud providers and came away with no real winner – each bringing its own mixed bacg of powerful features paired with quirks and complexity.

Around the same time as the launch of the AWS CLI, the first version of the AWS mobile app for andoid was also announced.

Here’s hoping for better developer productivity tools and interfaces in coming years!