Back in the day, I was astonished by the number of PowerShell commands that AWS (Amazon Web Services) had written. It was a huge number—I believe it was around 5,000. There’s probably a post or two on this site where it’s mentioned. Based on the number, it was clear that AWS had made a commitment to (wrapping their APIs with) PowerShell. Back then, it was easy to calculate the number of commands because of that single, PowerShell module. Install the module, count the commands (programmatically of course), and done. Over the last two or three years—I’m not 100% sure—-they moved to a model where modules are separated out by service. I greatly suspect that the single-module model was no longer suitable. Who wants to import a few thousand commands by default, when they only needed maybe one or two? Over time, I suspect that it probably wasn’t the most efficient way in which to handle the high number of commands.
Now, AWS has modules with names that begin with AWS.Tools. In the below example, I have assigned the $AWSModules variable with all the AWS modules located in the PowerShell Gallery that begin with the name AWS.Tools.*.
$AWSModules = Find-Module -Name AWS.Tools.* $AWSModules.Count 241
$AWSModules | Select-Object -First 10 -Property Name,Version
Name Version ---- ------- AWS.Tools.Common 4.1.10.0 AWS.Tools.EC2 4.1.10.0 AWS.Tools.S3 4.1.10.0 AWS.Tools.Installer 1.0.2.0 AWS.Tools.SimpleSystemsManagement 4.1.10.0 AWS.Tools.SecretsManager 4.1.10.0 AWS.Tools.SecurityToken 4.1.10.0 AWS.Tools.IdentityManagement 4.1.10.0 AWS.Tools.Organizations 4.1.10.0 AWS.Tools.CloudFormation 4.1.10.0
Once I determined that there were over 240 individual modules, I piped the $AWSModule variable to the Get-Member command to view its methods and properties. I didn’t know what I was after, but out of the returned properties, I was intrigued by the Includes property. I used that property as a part of the below command. Each of the 241 entries includes a Command, DscResource, Cmdlet, Workflow, RoleCapability, and Function nested property inside the Includes property.
$AWSModules.Includes | Select-Object -First 3
Name Value
---- -----
Command {Clear-AWSHistory, Set-AWSHistoryConfiguration, Initialize-AWSDefaultConfiguration, Clear-AWSDefaultConfiguration…}
DscResource {}
Cmdlet {Clear-AWSHistory, Set-AWSHistoryConfiguration, Initialize-AWSDefaultConfiguration, Clear-AWSDefaultConfiguration…}
Workflow {}
RoleCapability {}
Function {}
Command {Add-EC2CapacityReservation, Add-EC2ClassicLinkVpc, Add-EC2InternetGateway, Add-EC2NetworkInterface…}
DscResource {}
Cmdlet {Add-EC2CapacityReservation, Add-EC2ClassicLinkVpc, Add-EC2InternetGateway, Add-EC2NetworkInterface…}
Workflow {}
RoleCapability {}
Function {}
Command {Add-S3PublicAccessBlock, Copy-S3Object, Get-S3ACL, Get-S3Bucket…}
DscResource {}
Cmdlet {Add-S3PublicAccessBlock, Copy-S3Object, Get-S3ACL, Get-S3Bucket…}
Workflow {}
RoleCapability {}
Function {}
After some more inspection, I decided that each command populated the Command property and the Cmdlet or the Function property, as well, depending on what type of commands were included in the module. Next, I just returned the commands using dot notation. This isn’t all of them, but you get the idea.
$AWSModules.Includes.Command
Clear-AWSHistory Set-AWSHistoryConfiguration Initialize-AWSDefaultConfiguration Clear-AWSDefaultConfiguration Get-AWSPowerShellVersion ... Remove-FISExperimentTemplate Remove-FISResourceTag Start-FISExperiment Stop-FISExperiment Update-FISExperimentTemplate
If you’re curious, as I was, Update-FISExperimentTemplate, “Calls the AWS Fault Injection Simulator UpdateExperimentTemplate API operation.” I have no idea.
With a little more dot notation, I was able to get the count.
$AWSModules.Includes.Command.Count 8942
And now, I know what I used to know. I also know that AWS has been busy. And, that they’ve continued to make a huge effort in the PowerShell space. If you don’t go straight to the PowerShell Gallery, and I would recommend you do, you can always start at the AWS PowerShell webpage.
