Development and operations (DevOps) is the art and science of streamlining the process between developers and operations (system/infrastructure/network administrators). This process is useful for software development shops using an agile methodology.

DevOps is about developers and operations who are working jointly, where teams understand their place in the pipeline, are a part of the feedback loop, and optimize each other.

The DevOps culture is gaining steam, from startups to software giants. The automation of repetitive tasks is at the heart of DevOps. By following the DevOps principle, teams can achieve the following objectives:

• Less time putting out fires;
• More time on customer tickets and solving pain points;
• Much faster recovery from failures;
• Improved company valuation;
• Higher job satisfaction; and
• More time on value-added activities.

DevOps is lean for information technology (IT), which means that companies following the DevOps culture can benefit from the focus on customer value, waste elimination, reduced cycle times, shared learning, and avoiding batching. Moreover, streamlining automation makes compliance easier. Some of the popular DevOps tools--GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab--serve as source control repositories. Jenkins and Travis CI serve as continuous integration tools. Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, and Windows PowerShell are by far the most popular configuration management tools.

In this book, the author takes readers through deploying thousands of servers on the Microsoft operating system (OS) using PowerShell, which is as powerful as the command line for Windows. Some of the examples that come in handy are automating the build as an active directory farm, deploying Microsoft Exchange Servers, and configuring Lync, a popular unified messaging system. This is particularly like the use of Puppet, a configuration management tool, to deploy a three-tier web application and database architecture with standardized settings on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The book serves as a reference for any infrastructure personnel deploying on AWS. On the negative side, this book has neither a DVD for concept reinforcement nor a pocket guide of the most important information.

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