I write a lot of Powershell these days; it’s my go-to language for quick jobs that need to interact with external systems, like an API, a DB, or the file system for example.
Nothing to configure, nothing to deploy, nothing to set up really; just hack a script together and run it. Perfect for one-off little tasks.
I’ve used it for all manner of things in my career so far, most notably for Azure automation back before Azure had decent automation in place. We’re talking pre-Resource Manager environment creation stuff.
I would tie together a suite of separate scripts which would individually:
- create a Storage account,
- get the key for the Storage account,
- create a DB instance,
- execute a DB initialisation script,
- create a Service Bus,
- execute a Service Bus initialisation script,
- deploy Cloud Services,
- start/stop/restart those services
Tie that lot together and I could spin up an entire environment easily.
