Book Image

AWS Tools for PowerShell 6

By : Ramesh Waghmare
Book Image

AWS Tools for PowerShell 6

By: Ramesh Waghmare

Overview of this book

AWS Tools for PowerShell 6 shows you exactly how to automate all the aspects of AWS. You can take advantage of the amazing power of the cloud, yet add powerful scripts and mechanisms to perform common tasks faster than ever before. This book expands on the Amazon documentation with real-world, useful examples and production-ready scripts to automate all the aspects of your new cloud platform. It will cover topics such as managing Windows with PowerShell, setting up security services, administering database services, and deploying and managing networking. You will also explore advanced topics such as PowerShell authoring techniques, and configuring and managing storage and content delivery. By the end of this book, you will be able to use Amazon Web Services to automate and manage Windows servers. You will also have gained a good understanding of automating the AWS infrastructure using simple coding.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Getting and exploring help options

Microsoft has designed PowerShell in such a way that it is easy to use for complex scripting and automation tasks, and it is also easy to use for an interactive command. The standard naming convention used for a PowerShell cmdlet will assist you in figuring out how to accomplish certain tasks. Understanding the help system capability in PowerShell will help you to write the complex scripting cases in a large infrastructure setup, and the help system in PowerShell will become your most important resource. On some Windows systems, in case you do not find the help system installed, you can update it using the update-Help cmdlet:

PS C:\>Update-Help -Force

Force with Update-Help indicates that the Update-Help cmdlet does not follow the once-per-day limitation; it skips version checking and downloads files that exceed the 1 GB limit. Also, you need to ensure that you started PowerShell as an administrator before attempting to run this command.

The Get-Help cmdlet displays information about the necessary help for any other cmdlet that you need the information for. You can seek help on any cmdlet using Get-Help. For example, if you want to seek information on the Get-Process cmdlet, then you can use the following command:

PS C:\>Get-Help Get-Process

The output shows the help for Get-Process. I would encourage you to check the following commonly used variant of the Get-Help cmdlet, which would feed you more detailed information on the specific cmdlet. This is what will help you to understand the command usage in detail when you start scripting:

PS C:\>Get-Help Get-Process -ShowWindow
PS C:\>Get-Help Get-Process -Detailed
PS C:\>Get-Help Get-Process -Full
PS C:\>Get-Help Get-Process -Online