Looking Forward: Microsoft Support for Secure Shell (SSH)

PowerShell Team

June 3rd, 2015

[UPDATE]: Read more about our detailed plans, roadmap, and where you can play with the in-progress code here.

As Microsoft has shifted towards a more customer-oriented culture, Microsoft engineers are using social networks, tech communities and direct customer feedback as an integral part on how we make decisions about future investments. A popular request the PowerShell team has received is to use Secure Shell protocol and Shell session (aka SSH) to interoperate between Windows and Linux – both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa, Windows connecting to and managing Linux via SSH. Thus, the combination of PowerShell and SSH will deliver a robust and secure solution to automate and to remotely manage Linux and Windows systems.

SSH solutions are available today by a number of vendors and communities, especially in the Linux world. However, there are limited implementations customers can deploy in Windows production environments. After reviewing these alternatives, the PowerShell team realized the best option will be for our team to adopt an industry proven solution while providing tight integration with Windows; a solution that Microsoft will deliver in Windows while working closely with subject matter experts across the planet to build it. Based on these goals, I’m pleased to announce that the PowerShell team will support and contribute to the OpenSSH community – Very excited to work with the OpenSSH community to deliver the PowerShell and Windows SSH solution!

A follow up question the reader might have is When and How will the SSH support be available? The team is in the early planning phase, and there’re not exact days yet. However the PowerShell team will provide details in the near future on availability dates.

Finally, I’d like to share some background on today’s announcement, because this is the 3rd time the PowerShell team has attempted to support SSH. The first attempts were during PowerShell V1 and V2 and were rejected. Given our changes in leadership and culture, we decided to give it another try and this time, because we are able to show the clear and compelling customer value, the company is very supportive. So I want to take a minute and thank all of you in the community who have been clearly and articulately making the case for why and how we should support SSH! Your voices matter and we do listen.

Thank you!

Angel Calvo

Group Software Engineering Manager

PowerShell Team

Additional Information

For more information on SSH please go to http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4251.txt

For information on OpenSSH go to: http://www.openssh.com/index.html