Amazon Web Services continues Windows push with PowerShell

IDG News Service - Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added PowerShell to the management options for its cloud, in a move that reaches out to the Windows community.

Part of Amazon's Microsoft push is to let developers and administrators manage their AWS services in a way that's natural to them, according to the company.

AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell provide over 550 so-called cmdlets for allowing administrators to make service calls or create scripts for automating cloud management, all from within the command line-based PowerShell environment. A cmdlet is a lightweight command that is used in PowerShell.

Twenty services from Amazon can be managed using Tools for Windows PowerShell, including Relational Database Service, Simple Storage Service (S3), Virtual Private Cloud and of course EC2 itself.

PowerShell is an important tool for Windows administrators, and a good addition to Amazon's cloud, according to Giorgio Nebuloni, research manager for servers at IDC.

In addition to using PowerShell, enterprises can now also run Windows Server 2012 on EC2 and buy Windows Server-compatible apps on the AWS Marketplace.

While Amazon is making it easier to run Windows in its cloud, Microsoft has also quietly started to support Linux on its Azure cloud. But at some point it might try to target that part of the market more aggressively, according to Nebuloni.

The share of Windows deployments on Amazon's cloud is still relatively small compared to the number of Linux servers, Nebuloni said.

AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell canbe downloaded from Amazon's website, where there is also more information on how to use it.

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