DrillSergeant – a simple UserData manager for provisioning EC2 Windows instances

There’s a more full announcement due over at the Domain Tech Blog, however I figured I’d drop one here too.

Ever tried to automatically provision Windows EC2 instances in AWS and run into the “Windows needs a reboot” problem? Needed to run some more code after the reboot and been stuck for a decent solution? Had to Join to AD and then carry on installing things? Rename a server? Reload the registry after a change before continuing? Tearing your hair out working with Scheduled tasks and the RunOnce registry key?

Worry no more.

DrillSergeant, a PowerShell UserData manager derived from Domain’s Robot Army, is now available on GitHub.

Yes, I went through all the pain and came out with something that works, and works well, so we released it into the wild for everyone to use. Do feel free to grab a copy and try it out, and send in a Pull request if you have useful changes to add.

Future releases from the Robot Army will include DSC resources to manage S3 and EC2 resources, and some CloudFormation tools, and maybe, eventually, the Robot Army itself. If I can make it a tad more generic.

 

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