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Taking AWS CloudShell for a spin

by Greg Cockburn, Principal Practice Lead at AC3 and AWS APN Ambassador.

Taking AWS CloudShell for a spin

Today, AWS announced that they now have a cloud shell. This was a significant missing feature that another cloud provider has had for a long time, so it's great to see it land.

Jeff has done a great job doing a writeup as usual and you can find his blog post here.

Let's take this thing for a spin.

Logging in via my SSO I can easily find it in the new unified search capability:

But, my excitement was short lived:

It's not supported in Sydney. Oh well, let's test using Oregon.

When you click through to CloudShell you are first presented with the popup announcing some of the features available to you:

It took about 4 minutes or so to spin up an environment and was greeted with the traditional Linux/UNIX type prompt and a uname - suggests that it is indeed running in an Amazon Linux 2 container instance:

The first thing I tried to do was look at all the versions of common tools. These likely match Amazon Linux 2, but off the top of my head, I do not recall.

Sadly no ruby and python is 2.7, not 3.x by default, but old faithful Perl 5 is there.

It was really easy to add ruby just by running sudo yum install -y ruby, so there is that.

The AWS CLI is installed as you would expect and auto-completion works, but it is a few versions behind. Also no CDK, cfn-lint, or aws-shell.

Some of the more interesting things you can do are to create multiple tabs, split the screen vertically and horizontally.

After terminating the instance though, my install of ruby has gone.

That would be a nice feature. Being able to bring your own images, or the capability to automatically provision components, possibly even the capability to use EFS or another shared file system as I can image teams in Enterprises might be really interested in this feature as it gets the requirement off their desktop/laptops.

All up this is a welcome addition to AWS services.

Our AWS APN Ambassadors will be sharing updates from re:Invent daily. Watch out this space and follow us on social - Twitter and Linkedin for more blogs and video updates!

This article was written by Greg Cockburn, Principal Practice Lead at AC3 and AWS APN Ambassador.