I would like to add aws-cli to my build and don't find it in the available package, nor do I find any discussion of the subject through a broader Internet search, so I was wondering if anyone in this forum might know if this is available somewhere that I have not found.

I would consider creating my own package, but the available installation options from Amazon seem to always assume they are running in the target environment and do not seem to contemplate cross-compilation to a build directory.

Any advice/guideance?

Thanks! -SE-

aws-cli seems to require Python.
So cross-compilation is not a big issue, but rather disk-space would be.

Depending on which platform you want to run this on, and how much disk you have there (except for VMs) it could be an issue to make it fit onto a device.

There are a couple of Python packages already available on OpenWRT: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/lang

You can take one as template, and modify the necessary bits to run it.
You'd need to make the Python a dependency of the aws-cli.

In a nutshell that would be it (mostly).