I use AWS occasionally and on those occasions I almost always discover something new and interesting. Today’s discovery is fairly prosaic but interesting in a number of ways: AWS CloudShell. I’m running a little behind the times here as this has been around for well over a year and I’m somewhat familiar with the GCP and Azure versions of the same basic thing.
AWS CloudShell is, as the name says, a browser based shell that is integrated into AWS. It is a free service that runs on a small Amazon Linux 2 environment that has 1GB of persistent storage. By integrated, it means that the AWS CLI and SDKs are already installed and ready to go. The basic environment has all of the Linux things you expect (vim, bash, git, python, etc.)
It isn’t terribly difficult to install the AWS CLI or SDKs, but this makes it trivial to test out commands and understand how they work. If you are command line oriented like me, it’s a nice tool to have access to and the price is right. I’m sure I’ll use it next time I need to experiment with something on AWS.