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Console, CLI, CloudShell

The Console, the CLI and CloudShell

The Management Console (console.aws.amazon.com (https://console.aws.amazon.com/ 24 )) is best for exploring; a mis-set Region selector (top right) is the usual reason a resource seems to vanish. For anything you repeat, use AWS CLI v2 24 :

Installing AWS CLI v2 on Linux and signing inShell
curl -sSo awscliv2.zip https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip  # or -aarch64
unzip -q awscliv2.zip && sudo ./aws/install
aws login          # CLI 2.32.0 or later: reuses your console sign-in, short-lived credentials

The AWS 24 commands in Getting Started with AWS and Amazon EC2 ran on the Windows build, aws-cli/2.34.14; commands and output are the same on Linux. Avoid aws configure, which stores a long-lived access key. Every command takes --output (json, text or table) and --query, a JMESPath filter:

Filtering a response with --queryShell
aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --region us-east-1 \
  --query "AvailabilityZones[].[ZoneName,ZoneId]" --output text
Output
us-east-1a   use1-az1
us-east-1b   use1-az2
us-east-1c   use1-az4
us-east-1d   use1-az6
us-east-1e   use1-az3
us-east-1f   use1-az5

CloudShell 24 , the terminal icon in the console's top bar, is a browser shell on Amazon Linux 2023 24 with the CLI, git and Python preinstalled, signed in as you, free, with 1 GB of $HOME per Region and a 20 to 30 minute idle timeout. CloudShell and Remote-SSH compares it with the alternatives.