One of the directions in which Red Gate Software is to build more tools and utilities that all of you can use for working in cloud environments. We aren't ignoring the desktop tools like SQL Compare and Prompt (v6, yeah!) that you've come to appreciate and depend on, but we are investing in expanding these tools to work with a remote, services style architecture since there are plenty of companies looking at AWS, Azure, or other providers for a portion of their applications.

I've been learning a bit more about the way cloud services work and one of the things that becomes important in an IaaS environment is scripting. The environment you get is a base install and if you need more software or processes to run when a new VM starts up, you need to script the various installations or configurations.

There are some great scripting features for SQL Server, like Finebuild for installs and Powershell for most everything else. Scripting is a great way to accomplish tasks, but like most skills, it needs to be used in order to be efficient and practical for most tasks. I've struggled with this, and I'm sure many others feel the same way.

However I am starting to think that Powershell might be the best investment in my future skills. The quicker I can write it and build scripts to accomplish tasks, the more I'll be able to do over time as I build a library of commandlets and scripts. That's if I remember to document them well so I can easily search for what I need.