When I made the leap from Product Manager to DevOps Manager I quickly realized where my knowledge gaps were. One gap that was very apparent was in the arena of software automation known as PowerShell.
What is PowerShell you say?
I said the same thing. In my former life as a PM I never really used it. When you deal with hundreds and thousands of computers on a daily basis, however, it becomes a support tool you cannot live without. PS is a tool that’s much more powerful than the Command Prompt. In a way, it’s also intended to replace the Command Prompt, as it delivers more power and control over the Windows operating system
A “shell” can be command-line based or it can include a graphical user interface (GUI). Windows PowerShell is a shell developed by Microsoft for purposes of task automation and configuration management. This powerful shell is based on the .NET framework and it includes a command-line shell and a scripting language.
Now I know what you are thinking. How am I going to learn yet another language? Well the great thing about PS is that it is pretty intuitive. Not only are the commands intuitively named but almost all of them have abbreviations.
What can PS do?
Well, what if you need to enumerate and query 800 servers to get a list of what version of .NET is installed on all of them? What do you do if you need to activate the Message Queuing feature on 350 windows 2012R2 servers? This is where PowerShell makes life much easier.
Where PS lives you can also find the Windows PowerShell ISE. ISE stands for Integrated Scripting Environment, and it is a graphical user interface that allows you to easily create different scripts without having to type all the commands in the command line.
This post is not a how to article or a teaching tool but more of an alert or, depending on how you look at it a warning. I strongly recommend learning PSl. Do it just as a fun afternoon adventure. I guarantee you it will make you into a windows SUPER Power user. My productivity has improved a thousand fold by learning and using this tool. Here are a few helpful links.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4307.powershell-for-beginners.aspx
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/10760-best-free-powershell-training-resources.html
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee617195.aspx
Hopefully you got the He-Man reference in the title.