PowerShell... An exciting frontier...
These are the voyages of a PowerShell adventurer.
Its continuing mission:
To explore strange new cmdlets...
To seek out new modules; new parameters...
To boldly go where no one has gone before!"
Richard's log, stardate 2457163.
Our destination for today is my very first post on PowerShell.org. As you can see, from the opening lines, I approach my journey in PowerShell as a exploration into the unknown, just like the crew of Star Trek, Next Generation did. Till now my journey has been a pleasant one, because you know, exploring PowerShell is a lot of fun! And your exploration should also be a lot of fun, for that reason I want to share with you my discoveries and experiences. These will help you, I hope, to boldly go where no one has gone before!
About Me, And A Statement
My name is Richard Diphoorn, and I’m a IT Professional based in the Netherlands. I work now for around 14 years in IT. My daily work consists mostly of automating, scripting, provisioning new servers, working with System Center, Azure Pack, SMA. Actually everything which can be automated, is that what I am working on. I believe in automation, it’s in my opinion the mindset every IT professional should have.
When I started working in IT, it was not called IT in the Netherlands, it was called ‘automatisering’; in english it’s called ‘automation’. And there you have it, the job I’m doing was always ment to do automation. But still I see a lot of ‘click-next-admins’ around in the field. This term has been thrown up by Jeffrey Snover, and what it means is that there are administrators who click their way trough provisioning and configuration situations, instead of trying to automate this.
It’s my personal quest, to get the intention into the click-next-admins, to learn and use PowerShell. I strive for a transitional change in the admin’s life, by giving them new perspectives on how to ‘do’ things.
For sure I am not the person who possesses all the knowledge, but at least I want to share my passion and the knowledge I build up till now, with the people who are open for it. And with this I invite you, to do together this exploration into ‘strange new cmdlets’. 😉
A Small Introduction
So, with this personal statement I kick off this first post. Our first mission is the exploration of what this thing ‘PowerShell’ actually is, which kind of advantages it brings to you, and why it’s here to stay.
I assume ‘level 200’ as the basic level of my audience, therefore I will not go into the very basics of how you operate a Windows Operating System. I try to avoid unclear technobabble as much as possible, but I don’t want to oversimplify things. I try to make it as simple as possible, but not simpler (where did we heard that before…hmmm…).
Monad, A Brief History Of Time.
If you are like me, you probably bought a little book called ‘Monad’, written by Andy Oakly, quite some years back (if I remember correctly, I bought this book somewhere late december, 2005. I saw this little book on a bookshelf in Waterstone’s, in London. I bought the book because I heard of MSH, and I wanted to learn more about it.
I was hooked. 100%
I still encourage people to read this book, because a lot of information in that book is still relevant, in term of concepts. Topics like the Pipeline, Verb-Noun syntax, cmdlets, repeatability and consistency did not changed from the first version of Monad that the PowerShell team released. This is also the reason why you still see ‘C:\windows\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0’ on all the Windows OS’es till now. This is because the underlying architecture did not changed. As we will continue to explore, you will see what I mean.
This book will explain to you the very first basic concepts, but for really getting into the dirt, I encourage you to read the Monad Manifesto, written by Monad’s architect, Jeffrey Snover. This manifesto explains the long term vision behind Monad, and describes many elements which are consisting today in PowerShell. This is really a comprehensive document on how Jeffrey first saw the big problems that existed in the way administrators did their work.
He explains the new approaches to different kind of models, and how existing problems be solved with these new approaches. This document will also contributes in your way of thinking the ‘DevOps’ way, because many concepts in here contribute directly to the way you should ‘do’ DevOps. For example, Jeffrey talks about ‘prayer-based parsing’, which is in direct conflict with predictability in certain DevOps scenarios.
Because you need to be able to predict what is happening when you go from Testing to Production. In all cases Deus Ex Machine situations needs to be prevented. You always need to know what is happening and why. In my opinion, DevOps is nothing more than just being really good in automating stuff, PowerShell gives you this possibility.
So, what is PowerShell, and how do I benefit from it?
PowerShell basically is a Shell ( a black box, in which you can type 😛 ), in which you can interact with every aspect of the Operating System in either a interactive or programmable manner.
You type commands in a specific format in this window, and magic happens. This is the simple explanation. Now the rest…
The concept of a shell in which you can manipulate the whole windows system in a interactive way or scripted way, with common syntaxes and semantics, was for me a really powerful and inspiring idea. This new shell helped me working more efficient, effective and with more fun. It enabled me to explore the whole OS, to boldly go where I never have gone before!
This concept is not new for the mainframe operators and the *nix admins; it’s something they are used to already for a long time. If you doubt if working on a command line is a bad thing, go and talk with the *nix admin in your company. They happily will show you how fast they can work, I’m sure!
So for you, as a Windows Administrator, what kind of benefits do you get from learning PowerShell? There are obvious benefits like getting stuff done more quickly, and doing it always in the same way so that you never make that one mistake again. A more un-obvious benefit is that you get to know the OS & Apps very well, because sometimes you really dig into the system, really deep. This level of knowledge can and will benefit you in terms of understanding how a system works, and how to resolve problems. This hugely contributes to your personal success in your career, because you are ‘the topnotch’ engineer. You will be the Geordi La Forge of your company, so to say. 🙂
PowerShell is dead, long live PowerShell!
PowerShell is here to stay, rest assured. Almost all the products made by Microsoft can be manipulated with PowerShell in one way or another. This by providing a direct API to the product itself, or either by providing a REST interface. A lot of products from third-party suppliers also support PowerShell, like VMware, NetApp and Citrix. PowerShell is really getting (or already is) a commodity; actually I advice customers to only buy products which can be manipulated with PowerShell.
Be honest here, if a product cannot be automated, how does this product contributes to the WHOLE business? The business thrives by efficient processes, and if all IT processes are efficient, the business profits hugely from that.
In every company where I have been till now in my IT career, make use of Microsoft software. I believe in the best tools for the job. PowerShell is such a tool. It’s ducttape, wd400 and a swiss knive in one, whatever you want to do, PowerShell can do it (and better).
PowerShell is here to stay my fellow IT pro’s, embrace it fully and enjoy the voyage!
I want to thank the crew at PowerShell.org to give me the opportunity to blog on this site!
Till next time, when we meet again.
