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Comment by dopylitty | Hacker News Reader

If you want to easily manipulate your AWS environment from the command line use the AWS cmdlets for PowerShell. The fact that PowerShell cmdlets work on objects instead of text makes them miles better than this or the AWS CLI because you don't spend most of your time figuring out how to wrangle text into meaningful output.

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Windows users have commented at how Bash-My-AWS's innovative use of unix streams reminds them of PowerShell.

The listing functions output lines of tokens. The first token is the resource identifier. Piping that output into functions for that resource type results in the resource IDs only being used.

  $ instances
  i-03dfa28fc8235df7b  t3.nano  running  prometheus  2019-12-31T14:10:45.000Z  ap-southeast-2a  vpc-9def06f8
  i-0fd7a4c81051f2718  t3.nano  running  huginn      2019-12-31T14:10:44.000Z  ap-southeast-2a  vpc-9def06f8
  i-0abcd6e9c302f35bb  t3.nano  running  rails-demo  2019-12-31T14:10:47.000Z  ap-southeast-2b  vpc-9def06f8

  $ instances | grep rails-demo | instance-asg | asg-capacity
  rails-demo-AutoScalingGroup-14SBR6O3W1FBL  0  1  2

  $ instances | grep rails-demo | instance-asg | asg-
  asg-capacity              asg-launch-configuration  asg-processes_suspended   asg-stack
  asg-desired-size-set      asg-max-size-set          asg-resume                asg-suspend
  asg-instances             asg-min-size-set          asg-scaling-activities

  $ instances | grep rails-demo | instance-asg | asg-desired-size-set 2
  $ instances | grep rails-demo | instance-asg | asg-capacity
  rails-demo-AutoScalingGroup-14SBR6O3W1FBL  0  2  2

Do you have any insights on how someone who is used to the text-only world of Bash transition to using Powershell cmdlets?

The problem I run into is that it just feels like so much typing to me. I have to read documentation. All the attributes HaveReallyLongNamesThatContainCapitalLetters. By the time I've made my beta version of the command I want to run, I feel like I need to open a text editor to finish it. Maybe add some error checking. Some comments too. Maybe a unit test or three. And now I have an entire project and all I wanted to do was add a line of text to the end of a file.

Part of the problem on my part is my own ignorance of the APIs and what commands are available to me. But it all seems too verbose to use practically. The Powershell language seems very good for what you would write a shell script to do, but for interactive commands, I have a hard time believing that people use it. It's just so verbose.

We are starting to solve the command line problem in Commandeer. https://getcommandeer.com/iac-running-suite In the next few weeks we will be rolling out a Bash Runner. This is a preview of the Bash Runner Page - https://imgur.com/Eruzzv7

Hasn’t AWSCLI supported toggling the cmd output to either text, json or csv for quite some time now or have I misunderstood your comment here?

You don’t get the impedance mismatch of text to objects that bash has when dealing with the complexity of AWS resources.

Bash-My-AWS wraps AWSCLI as thinly as possible and makes use of JMESPath and the text output.

The result is you have a simple set of commands that don't require you to type hundreds of characters.

  instances() {
    local instance_ids=$(__bma_read_inputs)
    local filters=$(__bma_read_filters $@)

    aws ec2 describe-instances                                            \
      $([[ -n ${instance_ids} ]] && echo --instance-ids ${instance_ids})  \
      --query "
        Reservations[].Instances[][
          InstanceId,
          InstanceType,
          State.Name,
          [Tags[?Key=='Name'].Value][0][0],
          LaunchTime,
          Placement.AvailabilityZone,
          VpcId
        ]"                                                               \
      --output text       |
    grep -E -- "$filters" |
    LC_ALL=C sort -b -k 6 |
    column -s$'\t' -t
  }

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