AWS Powershell Tools Snippets: Powershell Pipes

I'm on another AWS Powershell tools rant. Hopefully after reading this blog post you'll share my appreciation for how useful they are.

Powershell takes the idea of piping commands together (sending that output of one command directly to the input of another) to a whole new level of useful. If you aren't familiar with the concept, it's a great way to make your commands dynamic and intricate. Let's walk through an example.

Building a Docker container for easy SSH into Opsworks Stacks

Part of the concept behind Opsworks is the ability to create and destroy instances dynamically. If your instances are configured by Chef recipes all the way from AMI to processing production workload, this is probably something you do pretty regularly.

But this probably means that the IP addresses behind your instances change regularly. At some point you might get tired of constantly going back to the Opsworks console to get an IP address, I know I did.

Example Cloudformation template for Opsworks Stack

I recently spent some time struggling through the AWS documentation to create an Opsworks Stack using Cloudformation. The AWS documentation is comprehensive for the resources available, but a little lacking on examples for how to link them together.

I thought I'd share a sanitized example of what I found, so it's below.