In the previous chapter, we talked about Just Enough Administration, and how it can effectively restrict the permissions of users logging on to your servers.

In this chapter, you'll learn what DevOps is about, and why it has gained such importance in many IT environments. CI and CD are explained to provide basic information for the following chapters. Why does it make sense to combine DevOps ideas with PowerShell? This chapter explains the benefits of PowerShell and the different possibilities for using it in a DevOps context. Additionally, you will learn about PowerShell release pipelines, which will be introduced in the following chapter.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• What is DevOps?
• Why DevOps?
• Test-driven development
• Continuous integration
• Continuous deployment
• What are the challenges of DevOps?
• The value of PowerShell