After creating an AWS account you have access to many resources and services and there are different way to interact with them.

The core of the AWS platform consists of resources that can be accessed by APIs and nothing gets done without using them. Invoking an AWS API is the sole way that external users or systems can interact with AWS resources, and there’s no other way to use AWS resources without the API being involved.

There are different way to invoke an AWS API. The simplest is just using the Console. Each command executed in AWS GUI is in fact translated into an invocation to the underlying APIs.

If you are a system administrator or want to perform many and repetitive infrastructure operations by scripting the best way to interact with AWS is through the available CLIs – Command Line Interfaces (AWS CLI, PowerShell Tools, Amazon EC2 AMI Tools, etc).

If instead, you are a developer you will interact with AWS Platforms using IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) and your code will recall APIs through SDKs (Software Development Kit). AWS supports many languages (JavaScript, PHP, Node.js, and others), many mobile environments (iOS, Android, React Native, and others) and many IoT device environments (Arduino Yún, Java, Embedded C and others).

Here the details on how to configure the AWS CLI on your system: 

Setting up your CLI on macOS:

Download, execute this file and follow the onscreen instructions:  https://awscli.amazonaws.com/AWSCLIV2.pkg

To confirm the installation:

which aws
aws --version

Setting up your CLI on Windows:

Download, execute this file and follow the onscreen instructions: https://awscli.amazonaws.com/AWSCLIV2.msi

To confirm the installation:

aws --version

Setting up your CLI on Linux:

Download, unzip, install the AWS CLI v2 and verify the installation:

curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
unzip awscliv2.zip
sudo ./aws/install 
aws --version