Your points are valid, its not a total replacement to the console, and is a wrapper around Boto.

There are several reasons that we use this:

* 'Template' out our infrastructure. If us-east-1 is ever down, we can easily re-create and spin up in us-west or wherever we'd like.

* If us-east-1 ever goes offline (a-la hurricane sandy), we have a record of what size/how many resources we had in production. Especially helpful since our infrastructure is dynamic. We add autoscale groups as we gain customers.

* We can easily foriegn key models in other apps in our project to an Autoscale group/ELB's etc. Ex: a customer is assigned to a particular autoscale group or load balancer.

* The loss in accuracy is acceptable, as we don't use every feature of AWS, so we only (at this point) have built out the necessary features.