Installing and configuring the command-line interface (CLI)

Using Amazon's web interface is usually a great way to explore new services. The problem is that when you just want to go fast, want to create more repeatable steps, or want to create good documentation, having simple commands to execute becomes efficient. Amazon provides a great and easy-to-use command-line interface. The tool is written in Python and therefore is cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux).

We will install the tool on our laptop/desktop such that we can interact with AWS using bash commands. Linux and Mac OS X come natively with bash. If you use one of these operating systems you can skip the next section. On Windows, we first need to install a feature called Windows Subsystem for Linux which will give us the ability to run bash commands very similar to what you get on Ubuntu Linux.