Chapter 4. Automating administration
This chapter covers
- How to develop administration scripts
- PowerShell best practices
- PowerShell tools for development and administration
- Making scripts secure
PowerShell is fun, and being able to rattle off a script to do something in a fraction of the time we’d take manually is cool, but what benefits do we actually get? In other words, why are we doing this? This point hasn’t been emphasized in the previous chapters, but the underlying theme has been that PowerShell is all about automation. Automation brings speed, efficiency, repeatability, and consistency. These are good things in their own right. When added to other things that you can do because of the time you’ve saved through your automation efforts, the benefits become really worthwhile.
Windows has traditionally been administered through the GUI. PowerShell is all about the command line. We’ll look at administration styles and how PowerShell is blurring the boundaries. The introduction of PowerShell into the administration toolset brings about automation almost as a matter of course.