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What is the AWS Command Line Interface, and why do developers use it instead of only the web console?

Beginner

Answer

The AWS Command Line Interface, or CLI, is a unified tool that lets you control AWS services directly from your terminal using text commands, which is especially valuable for automating repetitive tasks, scripting infrastructure changes, and integrating AWS operations into deployment pipelines, since these actions would be far slower and harder to repeat consistently if performed manually through the web console every time.
aws s3 ls s3://my-bucket
Real-world example A DevOps engineer writes a shell script using the AWS CLI to automatically create a daily snapshot of a database and upload a log file to S3, running that same script every night without any manual console interaction.

Common follow-ups: How do you install and configure the AWS CLI on a new machine?;What is the difference between AWS CLI version 1 and version 2?

IaC (CloudFormation);AWS Systems Manager
All 7 AWS CLI & SDKs questions