Amazon Web Services Inc.’s enormous infrastructure offerings have made life much easier for developers in so many ways, but it also brings new headaches when it comes to managing that infrastructure — one of them the difficulty of using AWS’s time-consuming graphical user interface for oft-repeated tasks. That’s why developers are touting a new open-source alternative called the awless CLI, or command-line interface, as a better option.

Henri Binsztok, chief innovation officer at WALLIX Group, a so-called privileged access management solution that maintains awless, wrote in a blog post on Medium that DevOps teams are often wondering how to better manage fast-growing AWS infrastructures. DevOps combines developers and operations to produce applications faster and more efficiently.

“They question whether they should use the graphical user interface or [AWS’s own] command line interface? Or maybe a mix of both?” Binsztok wrote.

Now, awless is presenting a third option in the shape of the awless CLI, which it describes as “fast and easy to use.” Using the awless CLI, developers can run frequent actions using simple commands and view readable output that both humans and machines can parse, without leaving the terminal.

“Awless.io is an alternative CLI for AWS that values simplicity over exhaustivity,” Binsztok said. “It aims to perform 90 percent of tasks much more easily by changing the definitions of commands.”

The new awless CLI is more than just a front-end to Amazon’s own CLI. The company said it’s a brand-new interface written in the Go programming language that uses the AWS Go software development kit. The awless CLI currently supports Amazon’s IAM, EC2, S3, Route53, RDS, SQS, SNS, Cloudfront, Cloudwatch, CloudFormation and Lambda services, and will add more in future, Binsztok said.

The open-source awless CLI is available to download on GitHub for those who want to test it out. Awless has several pre-built binaries and Homebrew packages for MacOS users.

Image: Thomas Cloer/Flickr.com