It happened again. My Tweet, linked to a post here, became the catalyst for a change in the AWS PowerShell module. I’m 2 for 2. This time, AWS didn’t simply correct the spelling of a parameter name; they wrote a new cmdlet. Remove-EC2Instance works as advertised. It’ll prompt for confirmation before terminating an EC2 instance unless the Force parameter is also included with the command. It is flawless. You can always get the newest AWSPowerShell module at http://aws.amazon.com/powershell.

What this didn’t do, however, is fix Stop-EC2Instance. Steve, the individual that spotted this and my last AWS Tweet, and likely made these corrections and additions, said they couldn’t remove the malfunctioning Terminate parameter from Stop-EC2Intance. For those that didn’t read my last AWS post, the Terminate parameter never prompted for confirmation before terminating an instance (unless a change has been made since Remove-EC2Instance was released).

I read an interesting article recently that indicated to use termination protection:

“Use termination protection for non-auto-scaling instances. Thank me later.
If you have any instances which are one-off things that aren’t under auto-scaling, then you should probably enable termination protection, to stop anyone from accidentally deleting the instance. I’ve had it happen, it sucks, learn from my mistake!”

While it was still quite amazing to get a second change made to the AWSPowerShell module, I’d recommend that everyone continue to be careful with Stop-EC2Instance. Perhaps you can write your own wrapper function, with the same name as the cmdlet (and therefore, it’ll be the default when Stop-EC2Instance is called), that forces confirmation. Then again, you can just use Remove-EC2Instance now. We’ll hope that when people look to terminate an EC2 instance, they find Remove-EC2Instance before they find the Terminate parameter in Stop-EC2Instance, such as I would have, had it previously existed. 🙂