Windows PowerShell: Professional Training Is a Must-Have
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Let's say you own a car and you decide to take it to a new mechanic for its annual tuneup. Your new mechanic doesn't actually have any formal training in automotive repair or maintenance, but before he got the job he spent a lot of time playing Grand Theft Auto on his Xbox. He inherited some tools from the guy before him, so he opens the hood of your car and gets to work. You're later appalled to find that he's rewired your car to a small electric motor and replaced the steering wheel with a two-handed controller featuring X, Y, A, and B buttons.
Stupid, right? You'd probably never do that. You probably take your car to the dealer, which certifies its mechanics with the manufacturer, or at least go to a mechanic that's ASE-certified, meaning he's been to a specified number of classes and passed some tests.
Kinda crazy that you run your network differently than your car, isn't it?
Yet that's exactly what you do. Microsoft has finally started meeting customer demands -- mostly from large enterprise customers, to be sure -- to provide better administrative and operational automation. They're rolling out PowerShell support for nearly everything in the datacenter, giving administrators unprecedented access to, and control of, the technologies they manage.
And how many of your administrators know how to use that power? How many have you sent to training on it? I realize that Microsoft -- for reasons which I suppose I grasp, yet do not agree with -- hasn't released an official PowerShell certification, but it's certainly released classes. There are dozens of books on the market, including the ones I've written. There are self-paced training videos, too, like the ones I've done for CBT Nuggets.
But administrators clearly aren't getting that education. I know they're not, because every day I help answer forums questions from guys and gals who are trying their damnedest to do a good job, and who just haven't been given any kind of grounding in basic PowerShell skills. They're making newbie mistakes, and they're painfully aware that they're doing so -- they even apologize for being noobs when they ask the questions. They're learning from people's blog posts (if it's on the Internet, it must be accurate, right?), from Q&A forums and from magazine articles. They're desperately trying to educate themselves for you -- but this isn't like changing a tire on a car. PowerShell is a complex technology with many unobvious bits that you simply won't pick up on your own.
If your admins are like most of the ones I know, they're go-getters. They know PowerShell is the future, and it's becoming increasingly mandatory. Try doing much of anything in Azure, or Exchange Server, or even Office 365 without using PowerShell and you'll see what I mean. So they put their nose to the grindstone, flatten it out nicely and learn what they can.
And they're learning on your production network. In many cases they're adopting awful habits, and creating an infrastructure full of hard-to-maintain patterns, without even realizing it. They simply don't know any better. They're doing the best with what they've got -- which is virtually nothing.
Yeah, when it comes to a lot of Microsoft server products, you can often get by for a long time with pretty minimal training. After all, it's just point-and-click, right? But PowerShell is a form of software development. There are no wizards, and it's incredibly freeform. That means the shell offers a ton of power, a metric ton of flexibility and a metric butt-ton of room to go wrong.
And believe you me, you've got admins going wrong. I'm seeing it every day. There's a big community of folks trying to set everyone straight, but unless they find us (I'm at PowerShell.org, for what it's worth), they're just scrambling around on their own. That's not good for you.
The moral of the story, of course, is to get your people trained. Find your best and brightest, the ones who can become your Automation Makers, and send them to a quality class taught by an awesome instructor. Buy them a good book, for pity's sake, or get a subscription to a video training library. You don't need to train the entire team; the enterprise pattern is shaping up as having a relatively small number of bright, adaptable IT folks taking on the role of PowerShell Wrangler. They use their shell sk1llz to create easier-to-use units of automation for the rest of the team; they become your Toolmakers. They're the ones who attend specialized events like the PowerShell Summit to hone and deepen their skills. They're the ones you rely on to make everyone else more efficient, and to manage the PowerShell beast in your environment. Give them enough training, and you can measure the man-hours they save you. Yeah, it's return on investment time, in a big way.
But for the love of your entire IT infrastructure, don't make them do it blind. Please, get them some education, or you're going to find yourself in a sorry state in an amazingly short period of time. PowerShell isn't hard, but it is complex, and it offers a lot of opportunity to go down the wrong path.
Get your team on the right path. Get them trained. Please.
Posted by Don Jones on 10/29/2013 at 11:28 AM