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Simon Caplette edited this page Jun 1, 2017 · 31 revisions

This document will guide you through a tour of awless features:

Setup your AWS account with awless

You basically need your AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY exported in your environment.

If you have previously used aws CLI or aws-shell, you don't need to do anything! Your credentials will be automatically loaded by awless from the ~/.aws/credentials folder.

Otherwise, get your AWS credentials from IAM console. Then, you can download and store them to ~/.aws/credentials (Unix) or %UserProfile%\.aws\credentials (Windows).

For more options, see Installation (wiki).

Changing AWS region or profile

There is 3 ways to customize the AWS region/profile used in awless:

  1. awless config: aws.region/aws.profile. Ex: awless config set aws.region eu-west-1
  2. AWS env variables: AWS_DEFAULT_REGION/AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE
  3. Global flags: --aws-region/--aws-profile. Ex: awless list subnets -v --aws-region eu-west-1 (Note: -v verbose flag shows region and profile)

At runtime, the latests overwrite the previous ones. For example, the AWS_DEFAULT_REGION env variable takes precedence over awless config key. Similarly, the --aws-region flag takes precedence over AWS_DEFAULT_REGION and awless config key.

Setup shell autocompletion

Awless has commands, subcommands and flag completion. It becomes really useful for CRUD oneliner when managing resources for example.

Read the wiki page for setting autocompletion for bash or zsh.

First awless commands

awless works by performing commands, which query either the AWS services or a local snapshot of the cloud services.

Listing resources

You can list various resources:

awless list buckets
awless list instances --sort uptime

# ls is an alias for list
awless ls users --format csv             
awless ls roles --sort name,id
awless ls vpcs --format=json

Listing resources by default performs queries directly to AWS. If you want, you can also query the local snapshot:

awless list subnets --local

Use awless list, awless list -h or awless help list to see all resources that can be listed.

Listing and filtering via properties

When dealing with long lists of resources you can filter by property with the --filter flag as such:

awless list volumes --filter state=in-use --filter type=gp2

# or with a csv notation
awless list instances --filter state=running,type=t2.micro 

# when dealing with name with spaces use
awless list instances --filter "private ip"=127.0.0.1

For instance, you could list all storage objects in a given bucket using only local data with:

awless --local ls s3objects --filter bucketname=pdf-bucket

Note that filters:

  1. ignore case when matching
  2. will match when result string contains the search string (ex: --filter state=Run will match instances with state running)

Listing and filtering via tags

Listing also support searching resources with tags (mostly AWS EC2 resources have tags):

awless list instances --tag Env=Production,Dept=Marketing
awless list volumes --tag-value Purchased
awless list vpcs --tag-key Dept --tag-key Internal
awless list vpcs --tag-key Dept,Internal

Note that tags:

  1. are case sensitive on both the key and the value

Showing resources

awless show is quite useful to get a good overview on a resource and to show where its stands in your cloud.

The show command needs only one arg which is a reference to a resource. It first searches the resource by id. If found it stops. Otherwise it looks up by name and then arn. To force a lookup by name prefix the reference with a '@'.

# show instance via its id: relations to subnets, vpcs, region, ...
awless show i-34vgbh23jn        

# show bucket forcing search by name: objects, siblings, ...
awless show @my-bucket          

# show user using local data: user's policies, ...
# snappy! will not refetch but work with the local graph
awless show admin-user --local

Basically awless show try to maximize the info nicely on your terminal for a given resource

Creating, updating and deleting resources

awless provides a powerful template system to interact with cloud infrastructures.

awless templates can be used through oneliner shortcut commands:

Using the help:

awless create                # show what resource can be created
awless delete -h             # same as above
awless create instance -h    # show required & extra params for instance creation

Then:

awless create instance       # will start a prompt for any missing params
awless delete subnet id=subnet-12345678
awless attach volume id=vol-12345678 instance=i-12345678

Check out more examples at Examples

You can also run an awless template from a predefined template file with:

awless run awless-templates/create_instance_ssh.aws

In each case, the CLI guide you through any running of a template (file template or one-liner) so you always have the chance to confirm or quit.

For instance, you will get id/name autocompletion to fill in any missing info.

Note that you can get inspired with our in progress repo of pre-existing templates

You can also run remote templates with:

awless run repo:create_instance_ssh.aws       # from official awless repo
awless run http://mydomain.com/mytemplate.aws # from a remote url

Also more info on the design of the templates at Templates (wiki).

Log and revert template commands

To list a detailed account of the last actions you have run on your cloud:

awless log

Each awless command that changes the cloud infrastructure is associated with an unique id referencing the (un)successful actions. Using this id you can revert a executed template with:

awless revert 01B89ZY529E5D7WKDTQHFC0RPA

The CLI guide you through a revert action and you have the chance to confirm or quit.

Sync

awless syncs automatically (autosync) the remote cloud resources locally as RDF graphs.

Basically the autosync runs after resources creation, deletion and before you want to explore resources (awless show)

More precisely, the sync automically runs:

  • post the awless run command
  • post the template one-liners awless create, awless delete, etc.
  • pre the awless show command

You can disable the autosync with awless config set autosync false

You can also manually run a sync with awless sync. The command output will show in details what has been done.

Note that you can configure the sync per services and per resources. For example:

# disable sync for queue service (sqs) entirely
awless config set aws.queue.sync false 

# enable sync for s3object resources in the storage service (s3)
awless config set aws.storage.s3object.sync true 

# disable sync for load balancing resources (elbv2) in the infra service
awless config set aws.infra.loadbalancer.sync false 
awless config set aws.infra.targetgroup.sync false 
awless config set aws.infra.listener.sync false

Smart SSH

awless ssh provides an easy way to connect via SSH to an instance via its name, without needing either the AWS ID, public IP, key name nor account username.

If your local host has a SSH client installed, awless will use it to connect. Otherwise, it falls back on an the Golang embedded SSH client (ex: some Windows machines or minimalistic cloud instances that pilot awless).

Connecting to an instance through SSH the key and default SSH user are deduced automatically by awless.

So you can simply and directly ssh to an instance with:

awless ssh my-instance-name  # with a name
awless ssh i-abcd1234        # with an id

You can still specify an SSH user or a SSH key though with:

awless ssh ubuntu@i-abcd1234
awless ssh -i ~/.ssh/mykey ubuntu@i-abcd1234

Useful as well, you can also print the SSH config or SSH CLI for any valid instances with:

awless ssh my-instance --print-config >> ~/.ssh/config
# or 
awless ssh my-instance --print-cli

Resolving AMIs identifier

Amazon Machine Image are region specific. It sometimes becomes impractical to resolve dynamically a specific image distribution or architecture.

To alleviate the issue, the command awless search images -h fetches bares & public & available AMIs info as JSON against a specific image query.

It is mostly used to render some templates that needs AMI specification agnostic if the region.

The command uses a simple image query string that will be resolve against you current region (i.e. the one from your current CLI session). The image query string format is as follow:

owner:distro:variant:arch:virtualization:store

With this format:

  • only the owner field is mandatory.
  • owner value has to be from the list of supported ones (ex: canonical, redhat, debian, amazonlinux, suselinux, microsoftserver). Run the help on the command to know exactly which owners are supported.

Here are some usage examples:

# output JSON info on official ubuntu AMIS
awless search images canonical   

# output the unique AMI id (latest sorted by AMIs creation date) on Ubuntu Trusty 
awless search images canonical::trusty  --id-only  

# output all the AMIs id of RedHat 6.8 distribution
awless search images redhat::6.8  --ids-only  

# output all AMIs id for debian with a back storage of instance-store (i.e. not ebs but transient AWS instance storage) 
awless search images debian:::::instance-store --ids-only

When you want to create instance with a specific distribution and you want your template to be valid accroos region, you can do:

awless create instance type=t2.macro image=$(awless search images redhat::7.3 --id-only)

Aliasing

When it makes sense we provide the concept of alias. Cloud resources ids can be a bit cryptic. An alias is just an already existing name of a resource. Given a alias we resolve the proper resource id. For instance:

awless ssh my-instance         # ssh to the instance by name. awless resolves its id
awless delete id=@my-instance  # delete an instance using its name

Inspectors

Inspectors are small CLI utilities that leverage awless graph modeling of cloud resources. Basically an inspector is a program that implements the following interface:

type Inspector interface {
    Inspect(*graph.Graph) error
    Print(io.Writer)
    Name() string            # name of the inspector
}

Using awless cloud resources local synchronisation functionality, you can analyse your data offline (i.e: on your local graphs). There are some builtin inspectors that serve as examples: pricer, bucket_sizer, port_scanner, etc...

For example, you would run the bucket_sizer inspector with:

$ awless inspect -i bucket_sizer --local
Bucket           Object count    S3 total storage
--------         ----------      -----------------
my-first-bucket     4            0.0035 Gb
my-other-bucket     1            3.4946 Gb
third-bucket        422          0.0000 Gb
fouth-bucket        1000         0.0077 Gb
                                 3.5059 Gb

Note that - as a upcoming feature - using the local infrastructure snapshots (automatically synced), we will be able to run inspectors through time very fast (i.e: all done locally)! For instance, in this case you would see the evolution of your bucket sizing!

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