Installing PowerShell Core and AWS Tools

Let's understand PowerShell and PowerShell Core. PowerShell has been around for use on Windows systems since 2006. It is known as a task automation and a configuration management framework, particularly known for Windows systems until now. PowerShell is built on .NET Framework. .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Windows. PowerShell Core is built on top of .NET Core. .NET Core is a cross-platform and open source managed software framework similar to .NET Framework. Going forward, PowerShell for Windows and PowerShell Core would be PowerShell. Presently, I feel these two terminologies are used because the community wants to identify the open source related effort for PowerShell as PowerShell Core. With the release of PowerShell 6.0, Microsoft has officially made PowerShell open source, providing the capability to access to Linux, macOS systems, and many more. Going forward, there would be slight change in the way that PowerShell has been defined so far. Now, PowerShell is a task automation and is distributed as a heterogeneous scalable configuration management framework.

The goalpost is very clear--PowerShell for every system. Microsoft understands the necessity of the customer to manage complex heterogeneous IT environments, and they want to have a universal shell that can support multiple systems, which will benefit their huge customer base and simplify the administration and management for complex IT systems. The cloud is redefining many things and adding more complexities in managing the infrastructure. By having one unified shell, we can bridge the gap to manage multiple cloud systems in addition to on-premise data centers. The open source will allow for a cross-pollination of administrators to manage multiple types of server operating systems from any system. This level of flexibility is unprecedented and will be useful for standardizing the management of different platforms. PowerShell is the answer here.

In this chapter, we will learn about installing PowerShell 6 on Windows and Linux operating systems. In addition, we will also learn about installing AWS modules on PowerShell 6.