Updates to AWSPowerShell Cmdlet Names

Since we launched the first AWS module for PowerShell five years ago, we’ve been hugely encouraged by the feedback from the user community, from first-time PowerShell users to PowerShell MVPs. In that time, we’ve acted immediately on some feedback, and put more complex changes into our backlog for future consideration.

One common request from experienced community members was to rename some cmdlets to change plural nouns to singular, as is the recommended practice. (We had initially created them with plural nouns as we tried to map them closely to the underlying service operation names).

Today we’re pleased to announce we’ve completed the remapping work. We’ve released new versions of the AWSPowerShell and AWSPowerShell.NetCore modules – version 3.3.96.0 – with singular cmdlet names and other cross-service consistency changes.

All the cmdlet name changes have backward-compatible aliases, so you should not have to update any existing scripts. You can continue to use the earlier names.

As we analyzed the cmdlets to determine where we needed to make changes, we found fewer problematic cases than we feared, but more than we’d like! To list them all in this blog post would be overwhelming. Instead, we added a page to our  cmdlet cross-reference on the web at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/powershell/latest/reference/items/pstoolsref-legacyaliases.html. You can also quickly inspect the changes by opening the AWSPowerShellLegacyAliases.psm1 file in the module distribution. For convenience both these resources list the aliases by service.

Please keep your feedback and feature requests coming! We really enjoy getting feedback (good or bad) and using it to plan improvements to the tools to address the problems you handle day to day.