AWS Powershell: “A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'Credentials'.”

I spent ages debugging this one a few months ago, and just hit it again, so I thought I’d share to save others some time.

If you have an older AWS powershell script, you may hit this error when running AWS Powershell cmdlets, particularly if using a cross-account role - e.g.:

$aws_role = Use-STSRole -RoleArn $arn -ExternalId $externalid -Region $region
$aws_creds = $aws_role.Credentials

Get-S3Bucket -Credentials $aws_creds -BucketName $bucket -Region $region # will throw "A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'Credentials'."

The problem is that at some point, the AWS Powershell cmdlets renamed the ‘Credentials’ parameter to ‘Credential’ (no trailing s). Running the script after upgrading AWS Powershell manifests the error. To compound this, I assume because of the way they’ve implemented the shared parameters, Get-Help doesn’t actually show the Credential parameter at all. I trawled through the release notes and was unable to find the version at which the parameter changed, or even if there was any warning.

The fix is obviously to rename your -Credentials parameters to -Credential, and then shake your fist in the general direction of Amazon.