[AWS] Powershell to figure out the encryption status of your EC2 drives.

since this turned out to be more difficult than I'd thought, posting it here.

$dbserver_instance = (Get-EC2Instance -Filter @{Name="tag:Name";Value="yourservernamehere"}  -Region us-east-1).Instances
get-ec2volume -filter @{Name="attachment.instance-id";value="$($dbserver_instance.instanceid)"} -region us-east-1

The tricky part is the tag:Name, which isn't obvious.  Also odd, if you just run the get-ec2volume with the tag:name and value, you get the exact same message as if you ran get-ec2instance!  I don't pretend to understand that.

[AWS RDS] Sending an email when there's a new version of RDS available

Something I needed recently.  Difficulty level: Get-RDSPendingMaintenanceAction ONLY returns info when there's something to be done.  If you're current, there's no way to find out what it looks like.

This will email you a HTML-formatted table with the details of each pending maintenance action for every instance in a region.