aws-cli is the Universal Command Line Interface for Amazon Web Services.
In order to execute aws-cli commands, simply supply the command and any subcommands as arguments when invoking a container, e.g.
$ docker container run -it --rm nbrown/aws-cli ec2 describe-instances
It makes a lot of sense to create an alias for the command, instead:
$ alias aws='docker container run -it --rm nbrown/aws-cli "$@"'
The aws-cli requires credentials, which can be provided using environment variables, passed to the container at runtime, using the --env configuration option, but it is better to mount $HOME/.aws inside the container instead, so that $HOME/.aws/config or $HOME/.aws/credentials are available to the aws-cli:
$ docker container run -it --rm -v $HOME/.aws:/home/aws/.aws nbrown/aws-cli ec2 describe-instances
Please Note: the user is set to aws, with a default UID of 1000. If the user on the host has a different UID, the aws user in the container will not be able to read the mounted credentials. In this scenario, build a custom version of the image using a build argument to specify the UID;
$ docker image build --build-arg UID=2000 --build-arg VERSION="1.16.175" -t aws-cli
If building the image from the Dockerfile, be sure to use a build argument to specify the version of the aws-cli to install; e.g.
$ docker image build --build-arg VERSION="1.16.175" -t aws-cli
To find the latest version available, check the Package Index for awscli