In this series, we present AWS tooling from the community, for the community. We talk directly with the tool makers. Who are they? What problem does the tool solve? And what motivates them to contribute to open-source AWS tooling.

This time, we talk with Florian Motlik about AWSInfo. You can find Florian on GitHub and Twitter.

cloudonaut: Tell us a little about yourself, your history with AWS, and your motivation to develop AWS tooling.

Florian Motlik: I always enjoyed building things that other people can use to become more productive. At Codeship, a CI/CD Startup I co-founded, I’ve worked with many customers on how to improve their processes. This has shown me a lot of different ways people use or build tools or what’s missing for them.

When we started using AWS in 2012, it was clear that AWS is great at building scalable services, but isn’t that good at building tools for smaller or medium-sized teams (or small to medium-sized teams in large organizations) so I started to build tools. After working at Serverless Inc in 2016 and becoming a consultant in 2017, this became more obvious, so I began building out my own tool suite. Since then AWS has invested in CLI tooling a lot, so it’s getting much better.

cloudonaut: What problem does your tool solve?

Florian Motlik: With cloud services, you regularly need to look up some information, see if something is properly deployed or what the status of some resource is. Going through the AWS Management Console 1000s of times a day is slow though, and the AWS CLI is a great tool but who can remember all the specific command names and flags. I wanted something that kind of replicates the data from the AWS console in my terminal but makes it easy for me to filter out and find what I’m looking for. I need a good read-only client for my AWS Infrastructure.

It also needed to be easy to extend and easy to adapt for teams if they want to get different information than the tool provides by default. That’s why it is built on top of the AWS CLI and allows you to print the CLI commands AWSInfo is using under the hood so you can copy and adapt them to your needs easily.

cloudonaut: Who should use your tool? Who should not?

Florian Motlik: It’s pretty much a tool for anyone using AWS in any way. Whenever you want to look up the IP of your EC2 Instance, check if your DynamoDB has the proper indices defined or see what the policy attached to a specific role states exactly you want to use AWSInfo.

cloudonaut: Show us a short demo of your tool

Florian Motlik: Watch the Introduction to AWSInfo on Vimeo.







cloudonaut: How can we use your tool?

Florian Motlik: It’s a bash based tool that builds on top of the AWS CLI, so you don’t need anything but bash and the AWS CLI. The easiest way to get the tool though is by installing it as a Docker container as all dependencies are properly resolved then.