Scripted...

I was at a day conference a week ago.

During lunch, I overheard a couple of people discussing PowerShell.

The back and forth went something like:

Engineer 1: "I never got that PowerShell stuff"

Engineer 2: "Me neither. We use Windows so we don't have to live in a command line!"

Engineer 1: "Yep, I'm SO much faster with Server Manager and the other GUI tools"

And you know what? In one sense they are probably right. They probably ARE faster in their familiar GUI tools for certain activities.

But one-size doesn't fit all and IT comes with many kinds of problems. Shells such as PowerShell in Windows (and now Linux) and of course all of the other old friends like BASH, ZSH, etc, in the many UNIX-like OSes can be tremendously powerful for many situations.

Repeatability Without Expertise

Consider a repeatable activity. A scripting language can allow an engineer to write a script, test the results in a test environment, prove the effectiveness or iterate until the desired result is achieved. Once complete, your script is now a tool in your toolbox, able to executed by both experts and novices alike. The engineer who writes need not be the one who executes it -- perhaps it's a more junior operations engineer. With the tested script comes also the expectaction that the correct outcome is likely regardless of operator expertise.

Problems of Scale

Consider the scenario of making a mass set of changes. While this could likely be achieved in many cases with a GUI tool, once again there is benefit to being able to develop a script, test it in a test environment, then use it to make mass changes -- with a proven likelihood of success -- and you now have that script to repurpose and reuse with as-needed modification in the future. If the scale is in the thousands of changes, performing those by hand is a recipe for mistakes and certainly likely to take more time.

Has To Be Done Right The First Time

Consider a critical change or set of changes that simply has no margin for error. Developing a script and testing it thoroughly can dramatically improve the chances of assuring something is done right the first time.

Scale, repeatability, and correctness -- not to mention the myriad combinations of those -- are just a few of the reasons to make sure your organization has a handle on scripting.