Video isn’t the best reference material if you want to quickly find one of those tips, so I will add a quick summary of them in this blogpost.

• By specifying source_profile in your .aws/config file, you can tell the AWS CLI to use credentials from one profile to assume the role_arn you configure in another profile. This also works in a chain of profiles and can include asking for an MFA token.
• You don’t have to get credentials from the .aws/credentials file, you can tell the CLI to get them from environment variables (this also works if you do not specify anything), instance metadata, or the ECS container role.
• There is a --debug flag, which gives you a lot of output to see everything that’s happening behind the scenes.
• In most cases you do not want that full debug output. Enabling history and using aws history show will give you the most relevant parts in an easy to read format.
• The CLI has the annoying habit of resolving all urls you give it. You can disable this with aws configure set cli_follow_urlparam false.
• You can make S3 uploads and downloads go a lot faster by tweaking the max_concurrent_requests. Or make it not exceed a certain speed with max_bandwith. See here for all options.
• The cli supports defining your own aliases. Look in this awslabs repository for examples.
• Instead of relying on an external tool (that needs to be installed), you can get specific fields from the response by using --query. Combine this with --output text to strip json-specific syntax.
• You can use completion in different shells.
• There are waiters you can use directly from the command line, so you do not have to write your own check-sleep loops in bash.
• Other useful cli tools include cfn-lint, aws-encryption-sdk, aws-shell and aws-vault
• There is a version 2 coming.

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