How to automate the Updating/Editing of Amazon Data Pipeline

I want to use AWS Data Pipeline service and have created some using the manual JSON based mechanism which uses the AWS CLI to create, put and activate the pipeline.

My question is that how can I automate the editing or updating of the pipeline if something changes in the pipeline definition? Things that I can imagine changing could be schedule time, addition or removal of Activities or Preconditions, references to DataNodes, resources definition etc.

Once the pipeline is created, we cannot edit quite a few things as mentioned here in the official doc: http://ift.tt/1HyzFzV

This makes me believe that if I want to automate the updating of pipeline then I would have to delete and re-create/activate a new pipeline? If yes, then the next question is that how can I create a automated process which identifies the previous version's ID, deletes it and creates a new one? Essentially trying to build a release management flow for this where the configuration JSON file is released and deployed automatically.

Most commands like activate, delete, list-runs, put-pipeline-definition etc. take the pipeline-id which is not known until a new pipeline created. I am unable to find anything which remains constant across updates or recreation (the unique-id and name parameters of the createpipeline command are consistent but then I can't use them for the above mentioned tasks (I need pipeline-id for that.

Of course I can try writing shell scripts which grep and search the output and try to create a script but is there any other better way? Some other info that I am missing?

Thanks a lot.