There are many ways to approach the broad topic of “security automation”. After repeatedly trying new approaches, evaluating them against my assumptions and goals, and modifying them as I learn new things, I’ve come up with a number of helpful insights. I hope you find them useful in thinking about your own security automation goals.

Automation in Windows has historically been a challenge due to lack of built in tools for remote management. In the past few years, the enhancements to PowerShell and WinRM (Windows Remote Management) have forged a path that is now more on par with other operating systems in regards to remote access.

Here’s PoshStack

OpenStack SDKs exist for several programming languages, including Python, Go, Ruby, and many more. For those who don’t wish to write code, users in the *nix world can use Curl at the command line to perform operations.

What about Microsoft Windows administrators? Are they required to learn linux and bash and curl? What if they could use the skills they already have, or learn new skills that are native to the Windows environment, for OpenStack administration? Is there a command line or scripting tool that suits the Windows DevOps world?

Having spent my last 7 years concentrating mainly on Linux® and related technologies, I spent 3 days with PowerShell and here are the some observations and anecdotes. Why PowerShell? Curiosity for one and I wanted to learn it from a perspective of how to use it in configuration management tools like Chef. As an disclaimer, I’m not an expert in PowerShell and spending 3 days is just scraping the surface but I did learn quite a bit in that time. Also my prediction is that PowerShell will be real force (if not already) in Windows environments. It is a mindset change for several Windows administrators who have grown up on GUIs but that is about to change in the coming years. And if you are Linux administrator, you are likely to feel more comfortable interacting the PowerShell way. I definitely did.

Maintaining hosts files on standard *nix system has been traditionally done by hand. This becomes a challenge as the number of systems grow and this is more true in the Cloud model where you might add/delete servers at a higher rate. One solution would be to use DNS and use a local zone to store your host name to IP mapping. If you are in the automation using Chef world, here is another example on how to automatically generate the host file entries.