Ubuntu client awscli unsupported by AWS MSK Kafka?

Question

Are kafka commands through the awscli not supported in ubuntu? Do we have to use 'Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM), SSD Volume Type' for any consumers/producers interacting with MSK?

When we stood up an Ubuntu 18.04 instance it saying that

awscli is already the newest version (1.14.44-1ubuntu1).

and aws kafka help shows:

ubuntu@ip-xxxxxxxxx:~/kafka_2.12-2.1.0$ aws kafka help usage: aws [options] [ ...] [parameters] To see help text, you can run:

aws help aws help aws help aws: error: argument command: Invalid choice, valid choices are:

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Answer 1

It looks like you installed awscli using apt. This will give you the version that the Ubuntu maintainers chose, which is going to be significantly behind the present.

To see just how far behind, you can run aws --version. Here's the output from a recently-updated installation:

> aws --version
aws-cli/1.16.153 Python/3.6.7 Linux/4.15.0-1037-aws botocore/1.12.143

I recommend running apt remove awscli to uninstall the version that comes from Ubuntu, and following these instructions to install the latest distribution from AWS (this installs it in /usr/local/bin and requires that you have sudo access; if you just want to install it for your user you can use pip as described here.