Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released tools for the Windows PowerShell scripting environment to enhance support for Windows administrators' management of cloud infrastructure.
The new AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell consist of over 550 so called cmdlets. These cmdlets enable Windows administrators to use the functionality exposed by the AWS SDK for .NET from within the PowerShell scripting environment. They can now automate AWS services using the PowerShell command line.
Version 1.0.1 adds support for AWS Direct Connect, AWS Data Pipeline, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshot Copy in addition to over 20 services it supported in its initial early December release.
The PowerShell cmdlets support AWS services like creating and managing Amazon EC2 instances, storing and retrieving documents using Amazon S3, and handling authentication and authorization using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).
Windows administrators can achieve simple tasks like creating new EC2 instances using a single command. Furthermore they can write scripts in PowerShell to automate more involved processes like orchestrating a cluster of services consisting of Amazon EC2 instances, databases on Amazon RDS, and content delivery services using Amazon CloudFront.
This example shows how to create a Amazon EC2 instance using PowerShell:
PS C:> New-EC2Instances -ImageId ami-269dbb63 -MinCount 1 -MaxCount 2 -KeyName PowerShellKeyPair -SecurityGroup PowerShellSecurityGroup -InstanceType m2.2xlarge
The AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell run on Microsoft Windows XP or later with Microsoft PowerShell 2.0 or later installed. They're part of the AWS Toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio. Amazon provides a document about setting up the AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell.