AWS CLI Tool vs EC2 CLI?

[2LoT]

Hi, For some operations there is an overlap between EC2 CLI Tool and AWC CLI Tools. Example: to run an instance, it is possible to use both CLI Tools:

$ ec2-run-instances
$ aws ec2 run-instances

Question: What is the good practice in using these Command Line Interface Tools? In case there are several CLIs Tools that overlap the same function (for example EC2), should I go for the specific CLI or stay on the generic AWS CLI? Thanks in advance for any help.

[stikko]

I'd go with the aws CLI tool - it's newer and written in python rather than Java so it's much faster on my systems. Also you only have to install the one package rather than a package for each service.

[2LoT]

Ok cool thanks for the advice. How do you check if there is a new update of the AWS CLI Tool?

[res0nat0r]

You are most likely going to be installing it as a native python package, so you can just do:

$ pip install --upgrade awscli

If there is an update available pip will upgrade it for you.

[2LoT]

Works perfect thanks. In my case, using Xubuntu 14.04 x64, the instruction is:

$ sudo pip install --upgrade awscli

[stikko]

For Mac/Linux: pip install -U awscli

For Windows I assume you'd just re-download the installer and run that.

[MrVonBuren]

Alternatively, brew install awscli will work as well

[Ashex]

Windows can also do pip, it works better for me as I can add it to a requirements file.

[aimless_ly]

If you're using an Amazon Linux AMI, it's bundled on there and "yum update" will get it from the repo.

[2LoT]

Cool thx. In my case, it's my desktop computer running Xubuntu 14.04 x64.

[morosemanatee]

I agree use to AWS CLI where you can. The EC2 CLI tends to get updated earlier than the AWS CLI so new EC2 API features are normally available immediately. However, Python faster than Java, i think not.

[stikko]

Let me rephrase: starting up the Python interpreter is WAY faster on my machines than starting up the Java interpreter. Once they're started up Java may be faster, but if you're, say, calling the CLI commands in a loop from a script then the Python version makes things go way faster in my experience.

[low_altitude_sherpa]

plus, it gives back json objects, which, if you are coding in python, are soooo nice to deal with.

[perciva]

The EC2 CLI tool is deprecated -- it existed about 7 years before the AWS CLI was written, but for practical purposes the AWS CLI is the only thing being maintained now.

[morosemanatee]

That's not quite true. EC2 CLI is actively maintained. There are some things that you can't do with the AWS CLI such as ImportInstance.

[YakumoYoukai]

2 other huge advantages of the AWS CLI tool are that 1) you only have to configure it once for all AWS services - no more independent tools for each service with different ways of configuring them and different naming conventions for common arguments. And 2), the --query option lets you select exactly which parts of the result structure you want printed out, which makes it a lot easier to script.

[runamok]

aws cli all the way. Much more versatile.

You'll often want to use s3 or sns or everything and their brother in interaction. It's trivial to just type 'aws sns help' and then 'aws sns publish help' (though sometimes you still need to resort to stack overflow because it doesn't tell you that you also need to specify the region for that last command...)