Alibaba Cloud CLI (aliyun) is the official command-line tool for the Alibaba Cloud platform. It provides unified access to 100+ cloud services through OpenAPI, including ECS (compute), OSS (object storage), RDS (database), SLB (load balancing), VPC (networking), Function Compute, and Container Service.
For AI agents, the CLI supports structured JSON output by default and a --output flag for tabular formatting with column selection, making results easy to parse. Agents can manage the full lifecycle of cloud resources: create and query ECS instances, upload files to OSS buckets, execute SQL on RDS databases, manage DNS records, and configure CDN. The aliyun oss subcommand provides S3-compatible object storage operations.
Authentication supports multiple modes: AccessKey pair (aliyun configure), STS temporary credentials, RAM role-based access for ECS instances, and external credential providers. The --profile flag enables switching between multiple account configurations, useful for agents managing resources across different environments.