One of the fun / cool things about Perl is that it can easily inhabit that space between "too complex for bash" and "too insignificant to invest in a C implementation." In my opinion a lot of the command line tools for EC2 are pretty terrible - they have a large learning curve, a high amount of dependencies and they just aren't that easy to get up and going.

So I started by thinking what was the "minimum viable product" for an EC2 client? Something that slaps a valid v2 AWS signature on any arbitrary API request and translates the XML returned into a Perl data structure. And that's…