97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know

Chapter 77. Beyond the Portal: Manage Your Cloud with the CLI

Marcello Marrocos

DevOps and Cloud Advocate

How long does it take to set up a server from scratch? Buy hardware, assemble, install the operating system, and it’s done. That’s how it used to be.

With the cloud, you can just log in to an administration portal with a friendly and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), and with few mouse clicks and configuration settings, your server is ready. In less than five minutes, you can remotely log in to your newly created server.

So far, so good. But imagine that you have to create 10, 50, or 100 new VMs. Using the GUI gets impractical. The task that took you five minutes will keep you busy for over eight hours if you need to create 100 new VMs manually, repetitively. And for a significant part of the five minutes it takes to create each one, you will be doing nothing but waiting for what you hope will be a success message. Moreover, there is the risk of making a mistake when typing the name or selecting the image.

But don’t worry, there is a practical solution for this: the command-line interface (CLI). Every major cloud solutions provider has a CLI, for several platforms. The structure of the commands may vary, but will often contain the provider’s initials, the resource (subject), and the action (verb), plus the additional parameters required for the operation.

For example ...