Ed Wilson - Windows PowerShell 3.0 Step by Step

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Ive always known that automation was a critical IT Pro skill. Automation dramatically increases both productivity and quality of IT operations; it is a transformational skill that improves both the companies and the careers of the individuals that master it. Improving IT Pro automation was my top priority when I joined Microsoft in 1999 as the Architect for management products and technologies. That led to inventing Windows PowerShell and the long hard road to making it a centerpiece of the Microsoft management story. Along the way, the industry made some dramatic shifts. These shifts make it even more critical for IT Pros to become experts of automation.

During the development of PowerShell V1, the team developed a very strong partnership with Exchange. We thought Exchange would drive industry adoption of PowerShell. You can imagine our surprise (and delight) when we discovered that the most active PowerShell V1 community was VMWare customers. I reached out to the VMWare team to find out why it was so successful with their customers. They explained to me that their customers were IT Pros that were barely keeping up with the servers they had. When they adopted virtualization, they suddenly had 5-10 times the number of servers so it was either automate or drown. Their hair was on fire and PowerShell was a bucket of water.

The move to the cloud is another shift that increases the importance of automation. The entire DevOps movement is all about making change safe through changes in culture and automation. When you run cloud scale applications, you cant afford to have it all depend upon a smart guy with a cup of coffee and a mouseyou need to automate operations with scripts and workflows. When you read the failure reports of the biggest cloud outages, you see that the root cause is often manual configuration. When you have automation and an error occurs, you review the scripts and modify them to it doesnt happen again. With automation, Nietzsche was right: that which does not kill you strengthens you. It is no surprise that Azure has supported PowerShell for some time, but I was delighted to see that Amazon just released 587 cmdlets to manage AWS.

Learning automation with PowerShell is a critical IT Pro skill and there are few people better qualified to help you do that than Ed Wilson. Ed Wilson is the husband of The Scripting Wife and the man behind the wildly popular blog The Scripting Guy. It is no exaggeration to say that Ed and his wife Teresa are two of the most active people in the PowerShell community. Ed is known for his practical how to approach to PowerShell. Having worked with so many customers and people learning PowerShell, Ed knows what questions you are going to have even before you have them and has taken the time to lay it all out for you in his new book: Windows PowerShell 3.0 Step by Step.

Jeffrey Snover, Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect, Microsoft Windows