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by nahikoa 2362 days ago
This looks like an awesome project!

Meta note: All things considered, Amazon has it pretty good. They put out a barely usable, bare-bones, but fully functional tool in awscli. Paying customers of AWS have to perform the engineering effort to make the API more usable, and some even open-source their projects like this. AWS is an incredible business model.

7 comments

I have sometimes questioned whether I should be spending my personal time developing an open source tool so tied to a single companies services.

My reasons for continuing include:

- I prefer to use command line over ClickOps

- Using Bash-My-AWS makes me more effective at work

- The emergent UX is equally applicable to other services (e.g. bash-my-github, bash-my-spotify)

- The intrinsic satisfaction from creating

- Helping improve the experience for others

I looked, no one created packages with those 2 names that I could fine, although there are some clis for controlling spotify it seems. Were you referring to specific packages somewhere for github and spotify?
bash-my-github and bash-my-spotify are two things I've made a start on but are not public yet. They've been on the backburner for a while due to competing priorities.

I was able to write a simple command that returned all songs a friend and I had in common in our public playlists.

I forget the exact syntax but it was something roughly along the lines of:

  $ sort <(
      user-playlists alice | playlist-tracks 
      user-playlists bob | playlist-tracks
    ) | uniq --repeated
Thanks for the tool and reasons for building it. I will check it out tomorrow!
More charitably, AWS provides a CLI for most resources and commands and (in large measure) either provides backwards compatibility or a long depreciation window. This allows hackers to build syntactic sugar on top of their infrastructure.

I love that a community has an option to build components and share the same. It has made my work much more productive.

But we certainly agree on that last point: it’s an incredible business model.

AWSCLI backward compatibility has been so good, I've never had a Bash-My-AWS command fail due to a change.

AWS CLI v2 previews were released in Nov 19 and while this may contain some breaking changes, I wouldn't be surprised if all the commands BMA uses continue to work as normal.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/aws-cli-v2-installers...

Anything above bare bones will be opinionated, imo this is the best solution for infrastructure provider - maximum freedom, but also providing a UI for simpler access.
The annoying part about AWS putting so little effort into smoothing out the rough edges in their tooling, ux and services, is that the whole ecosystem of helpers/wrappers developed to make the services usable by humans needing to get something done (rather than deep dive again and again into many rabbit holes of AWS's idiosyncrasies) - inevitably only cover some tiny subset of the services a typical shop is going to use.

Not to take anything away from the author of this project - Bash-my-aws looks fantastic - but it only helps you with a few core services. Same appears to be true of the commandeer tool that has also been mentioned in this thread. And the same is true for localstack, and on and on.

I really wish AWS would devote some resources to filling in these gaps themselves, and comprehensively.

How is this different than all of the git extensions that people publish.
Verbosity isn’t unusable, it has a steeper learning curve.
turning the flywheel