AWS has announced CloudShell, a browser-based shell available from the AWS Management Console. CloudShell makes it easy to securely manage, interact with, and explore your resources from the command line.

Once logged into the Management Console, starting a CloudShell session gives customers immediate access to a Amazon Linux 2 environment with the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) pre-installed and pre-authenticated using the same credentials used to login to the console.

Common tools and AWS CLIs are pre-installed and you can install other tools as needed by using the provided root access.

Bash, zsh, and PowerShell are all included so you can choose your favorite shell.

AWS CloudShell can be started from any supported AWS Region with one click. You can upload and download files up to 1GB to your CloudShell home directory ($HOME) and files, scripts, and tools saved in $HOME will persist between sessions.

CloudShell comes with 1 GB of persistent storage per Region. To get started, click on the CloudShell icon link in the top of any console page that appears when you are in a supported Region.

There is no additional charge for AWS CloudShell. You only pay for other AWS resources you use with CloudShell to create and run your applications.

AWS CloudShell is generally available in us-east-1 (N. Virginia), us-east-2 (Ohio), us-west-2 (Oregon), ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo), and eu-west-1 (Ireland) at launch.