As you may know, Jeffrey Snover and I have, for some time, been on a “servers are cattle, not pets” kick. Meaning, servers shouldn’t be special, individualized snowflakes. They should be, in many regards, appliances. One dies, you eat it and make another. They don’t have names - that you know of. They don’t have IP addresses - that you know of. Oh, I mean, they have them, but you don’t know them and don’t care.
Regular Expressions is often referred to as wizardry or magic and for that reason I stayed away from it for most of my career. I used it only when I had to and most of the time just reused examples that I found online. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but I never took the time to learn it. I thought it was reserved for the elite. Turns out that it’s not that complicated and that I had been using it for years without knowing it.
As a quick reminder, our Call for Topics is still open for a few more days! Summ. Summit is very much intended to be a kind of mega-user group, not a “conference,” so don’t assume all the “professional” speakers have taken up all the speaking slots. We want you to participate! In the meantime, while we’re waiting on the content committee to select topics and before registration opens in early November, I wanted to offer a peek at what we’re planning.
Remember that our Call for Topics is still open until the end of September, if you’d like to submit. And, from our Summit Alumni Slack channel, here are a few things people said they’d like to see… I would love to see a session on what it takes to build a PKI infrastructure in support of PowerShell operations ( stuff liked passing creds with DSC ) - this is something glossed over all the time as if it is not a big deal but I think it can be quite challenging for a lot of people to implement.
About a week or two before Devops Camp, the attendees were asked how much experience they had using Pester, because another attendee was preparing a discussion on Pester and wanted to gauge the other attendees’ comfort level. Learning Pester had been on my to-do list for a while, but I had procrastinated on it for far longer than I intended. I answered “Beginner” - although “complete and utter newbie” would have been more accurate - and I vowed to spend some quality time looking at Pester before arriving at camp.
Jason Helmick and I were talking last night, and we got onto the topic of expertise and respect. Kind of, “once someone really gets to that expert level, and they surpass their teacher in knowledge, you really respect them.” I disagreed, and said, “no, I respect them the minute they start contributing to the world, and helping others.” We all, at some stage, get “outsider syndrome,” where we think everyone else is so much smarter than us, that we’ve nothing of value to contribute.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of days, you already know that Microsoft announced last Thursday that the shell/scripting language formerly known as “Windows Powershell” is now supported on Linux and MacOS and that Powershell has been open-sourced. And for days, thoughts of “how can I use this?” or “I wonder if ‘x’ will be supported” have been flying through the minds of every system architect as we internally grapple with the possibilities of what could be, while at the same time trying to understand Microsoft’s motivation for this radical change.
As PowerShell begins to move into a cross-platform world, it’s important to really understand “why PowerShell.” What is it, exactly, that sets PowerShell apart? Notice that I do not mean, “what makes it better,” because “better” is something you’ll have to decide on your own. I just want to look at what makes it _different. _
Sometimes, as a developer, you want to be be able to keep track of free space on a drive, the size of a log, the load on your CPU, the number of users logged in, etc. With PowerShell, it is typically just a matter of finding the right cmdlet amidst the large (and rapidly growing) pool of cmdlets provided by Microsoft and by third parties. Then you just run Get-Foo to check details about the foo resource.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Windows PowerShell - which I suppose we’ll just call “PowerShell,” now - has been open-sourced, with PowerShell Core builds being made available for various Linux distros as well as macOS.
This is a big deal, but not exactly for the reasons you might think.
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