PowerShell Summit 2025 - From Pets to Cattle: Learning to let go and automate by Anthony Howell

We all want to be able to press that button that automagically spits out servers that are configured exactly as they need to be in order to be put to use. The problem is that in order to deploy and maintain servers in that matter, it takes a completely different approach from the GUI ways of system management. In this session, I want to take you on a journey of the different mindsets and approaches that will help or hinder your goal of complete infrastructure automation.

The first thing we'll talk about is letting go. We can't automate what we care too much about. So we'll talk things such as naming conventions, desktop backgrounds, and customizations. We have to stop fighting it and instead standardize it.

Secondly, we'll get into how modern tooling supports the goal of managing cattle instead of pets. Specifically, things like imperative vs declarative, idempotency, reusability, that sort of thing. The examples I'll give will center around the tools that I am familiar with, but the concepts are universal.

Lastly, we'll cover some of the huge advantages of maintaining your infrastructure in a disposable way. How it helps enforce change management, scaling, disaster recovery, and many other buzzwords that will excite any competent executive.
PowerShell Summit videos are recorded by our friends at Confreaks.

Our recordings are made in a way that minimizes overhead for our speakers and interruptions to our live audience. These recordings are meant to preserve the presentations' information for posterity, and are not intended to be a substitute for attending the Summit in person. These recordings are not intended as professional video training products. We hope you find these videos useful.

Follow Confreaks 👇
https://confreaks.com
https://confreaks.bsky.social
https://x.com/confreaks

Видео PowerShell Summit 2025 - From Pets to Cattle: Learning to let go and automate by Anthony Howell канала Confreaks