PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2026

What happens when you mix PowerShell with wires, motors, sensors, and microcontrollers — then add a spark of creativity? You get scripts that put the physical world at your fingertips; light up RGB LEDs, spin motors, rotate a servo, trigger a MOSFET switch, water your cactus, and whatever else you can imagine!In this session, we’ll take PowerShell beyond the terminal and into the hardware realm. You’ll discover the concepts, tools, and skills needed to bridge the gap from scripts to circuits, building your own PowerShell Gadgets with accessible yet powerful platforms:- FT232H-based boards — for direct I²C, SPI, UART, and GPIO control straight from your console. - Pico and ESP32 microcontrollers running Python — for flexible, wireless, and rich automation possibilities.We’ll cover the essential starter toolkit—what you'll need, how to wire stuff together, and how to speak its language from PowerShell — then jump into live, real-world demos that show scripts breaking free from software to control and interact with the physical world around you.

Tired of clicking through endless wizards just to spin up a lab? In this session, we'll show how AutomatedLab makes lab building fast, consistent, and code-driven—right from your PowerShell console.We'll start with the basics of AutomatedLab's cmdlets, then walk step-by-step through creating a full two-server Active Directory forest in minutes using its sample scripts. Along the way, you'll learn and see how AutomatedLab automates network setup, VM provisioning, domain configuration, and post-install testing—no manual intervention required.Next, we'll dive into a live walkthrough of a custom script that spins up a repeatable environment Domain Controller, Root CA, and Privileged Access Workstation for a complete lab with PKI. You'll learn how to parameterize lab builds, integrate external switches for internet access, and customize VM roles for your own scenarios.This is a practical, hands-on session designed for PowerShell admins and IaC beginners who want to see exactly how to rapidly build, tear down, and rebuild entire environments for testing or trainingCome for the live demos, stay for the reusable scripts, and walk away ready to replace manual lab builds with clean, repeatable code.

Managing software on Windows at scale can often feel like herding cats; however, when you combine the declarative power of Ansible with the package management reliability of Chocolatey, it becomes a piece of cake.

In this session, we will unwrap the chocolatey.chocolatey collection, exploring how it provides a complete recipe for declaratively managing packages across your Windows fleet. We will look at how to mix the right ingredients (idempotency, configuration, and source management) to bake a reliable automation strategy that always rises to the occasion.

Whether you are strictly open-source or using Chocolatey for Business, you will leave this session ready to write playbooks that are undeniably sweet.

Handmade chocolate is charming. Handmade Chocolatey builds? Not so much. When your packages rely on copy-paste scripts, tribal knowledge, and “run this step next,” things fall apart—especially at scale.

In this session, we’ll move from artisanal, hand-rolled Chocolatey builds to repeatable, factory-grade automation using psake. You’ll learn how psake can orchestrate building Chocolatey packages, extensions, and related tooling with clear structure, dependency management, and predictable outcomes. These patterns come from real-world use in large, fast-moving environments where Windows automation needs to be reliable, auditable, and boring in the best possible way.

Drawing on experience maintaining psake itself and applying it in organizations operating at massive scale, this talk focuses on practical techniques you can use immediately—whether you manage a handful of internal packages or thousands of endpoints.

Patch happens—often at the worst possible time. In this session, we’ll show how Chocolatey for Business helps organizations bring control and consistency to software management through automation, standardization, and self-service. Learn how to reduce manual effort, improve security, and turn patching from a chaotic scramble into a predictable, low-stress process.

In the world of cloud computing, Azure Automation offers powerful capabilities for managing and orchestrating complex IT processes. However, even the best tools can lead to pitfalls if not used correctly. In this engaging session, we'll explore the top eight mistakes that can derail your Azure Automation efforts. From common configuration errors to overlooked security practices, we'll dive into real-world scenarios and lessons learned. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting with Azure Automation, you'll gain valuable insights to avoid these common traps and ensure your automation projects are successful. Join us to learn how to turn potential missteps into opportunities for growth and efficiency in your IT environment.

In this session, we'll review Chocolatey's Central Management platform, exploring its features and use for both simple software installations and upgrades, and moving into more advanced use cases, including leveraging its robust API.

If you're looking for a streamlined way to manage software within your organization, this session will shed light on one of Chocolatey's sweetest products.

PowerShell isn’t just for sysadmins and DevOps pipelines; it’s also a powerful tool for making your everyday life easier, more efficient, and even a little more fun.In this lighthearted but practical session, I’ll share real-world ways I’ve used PowerShell outside the data center and beyond the cloud. From automating the hunt for our dream home, to organizing and deduplicating thousands of old family photos, to sending real-time weather alerts to my kid’s soccer team, and even assigning Secret Santas. PowerShell has been my go-to companion for solving real-life problems with code.We’ll walk through the scripts, logic, and thought processes behind these solutions. You’ll leave with a fresh perspective on what’s possible with PowerShell, along with tips for building your own everyday automations.Whether you’re looking for clever ways to sharpen your skills or just want to see what a little scripting creativity can do, this session will open your eyes to the power of PowerShell in your own life.

As organizations scale their Windows automation practices, accessibility is often treated as an afterthought addressed late, inconsistently, or only when issues arise. Yet accessibility is not just a UI concern; it intersects deeply with automation, configuration management, deployment workflows, and the overall reliability of enterprise environments. This session explores how accessibility principles can be embedded into automated Windows ecosystems using Chocolatey, PowerShell, and modern DevOps tooling.

Drawing from real‑world experience in digital accessibility and inclusive design, this talk demonstrates how accessibility thinking strengthens automation quality, reduces operational friction, and improves user experience for everyone, not only people with disabilities. Attendees will learn how to incorporate accessibility checks into CI/CD pipelines, package deployments, documentation workflows, and configuration baselines. We’ll also explore practical strategies for making internal tools, scripts, and automated processes more inclusive for administrators, engineers, and end users with diverse needs.

Whether you’re managing large‑scale Windows environments, building internal automation tools, or maintaining enterprise packages, this session provides actionable patterns to elevate both accessibility and operational maturity. Accessibility isn’t a separate track, it’s a force multiplier for automation done right

DSC v3 continues its evolutionary path, expanding into a more flexible, predictable, and approachable declarative configuration platform. Over the past year, the team has delivered substantial enhancements across the execution engine, resource model, and authoring experience. Configuration authoring is clearer and more consistent, schemas are richer and easier to validate, and new resource adapters make it simpler to integrate existing tools and ecosystems without rewriting everything from scratch.
 
This session highlights what’s new and what’s practical: writing and composing configurations, building custom resources, using adapters, and working with the latest export and testing capabilities. The focus is on real scenarios, repeatable patterns, and the forward direction of DSC v3 as it becomes an essential, lightweight foundation for configuration management across platforms. Join us for demos, discussion, and a look at what’s next.

Chocolatey packaging is often learned by example—and sometimes by accident. When packaging code lives outside of source control, teams lose context, history, and confidence.

In this session, we’ll break down why Chocolatey packages should be treated as versioned code and how even simple Git usage dramatically improves reliability and maintainability. We’ll cover common beginner mistakes, a sensible repository structure, and how source control enables safer changes and easier automation. Whether you manage one package or many, this talk will help you build packaging workflows that won’t surprise future you.

Sure, you can package anything, but, as you know, we believe strongly that you shouldn't have to package everything, especially not over and over again. In this session David James and Dan Gough will show off a new integration we're really proud of with Patch My PC and Master Packager.

Between our curated catalog will get you 90-99% patched, with no extra effort on your end, but for those special, complex situations when you need really a custom scripted solution, many of you rely on PSADT (We love it too). Then, challenges arise with what happens after you've packaged those apps, when deployment becomes clunky, versioning chaotic, and your environment becomes a dusty little script museum.

We believe even your most complicated PSADT-packaged apps deserve the same elegant systems as the rest of your apps. Enter: Master Packager. This integration helps you break the glass on those rare custom-scripted packages that just don't play nice. This integration converts otherwise difficult packages into PSADT apps (which work flawlessly with Patch My PC) and makes deployment with Intune seamless, just like your run-of-the-mill Chrome updates.

So pull up a chair and check out this session to see the system in action.

Choosing the right Terraform provider for Azure shouldn't require a trade-off between coverage, stability, and speed-to-market. In this session, we break down how AzureRM and AzAPI work together to give you complete Azure resource coverage—combining the polish of a curated provider with the day-zero agility of a thin API layer. We'll then do the same for identity: showing how AzureAD and the new MSGraph provider converge to cover the full spectrum of Entra ID and Microsoft 365 scenarios. In the second half, we'll open the hood and walk you through a real contributor workflow—from identifying a gap, to writing and testing a contribution, to getting it merged—so you can see firsthand how approachable it is to help shape the providers you depend on. Come ready to ask questions and, if you're feeling ambitious, to submit your first PR.

Every other discipline in IT figured this out years ago. Infrastructure, networking, application deployment — all moved to configuration as code because the scale forced them to. Endpoint management mostly didn't get the memo. We're still clicking through web interfaces, making changes one setting at a time, hoping we'll remember what we did when something breaks three months from now. That's not efficiency. That's invisible technical debt we've been pretending doesn't exist.

This talk is the case for moving your MDM into a Git repository — and a live demonstration of what that actually looks like. We'll cover why endpoint management got stuck in ClickOps while the rest of IT moved on, what config-as-code buys you that a GUI never can (history, diffs, code review, easy rollbacks), and how AI coding tools turn the slow part of this workflow into the fast part without removing the human review that keeps it safe. Includes a working sandbox-to-production pipeline with fleetctl and GitHub Actions.

I'm a Mac admin at a PowerShell conference, which I realize is a setup for a joke. It's also the point: the methodology has nothing to do with which OS you manage. Bring your objections — "git is too hard," "our team isn't ready," "the tools don't support it" — and I'll answer them.

Automation is critical to scaling IT environments, improving reliability, and reducing manual toil. In this 4-hour, hands-on workshop, you’ll go beyond theory and learn how to design, build, and deploy an end-to-end automation solution using Ansible—enhanced with PowerShell for cross-platform and Windows-specific tasks. Together, we’ll tackle a realistic infrastructure scenario, giving you practical skills to automate complex workflows across Linux and Windows systems.We’ll start with a concise overview of Ansible fundamentals—inventory files, YAML playbooks, roles, and modules—before diving into PowerShell integration for Windows automation. From there, you’ll follow along in a live lab to build automation that provisions servers, configures services, applies security hardening, and orchestrates application deployment across multiple nodes. By layering Ansible’s orchestration strengths with PowerShell’s depth on Windows hosts, you’ll see how to create a truly hybrid automation strategy.This is a fully interactive workshop: you’ll write your own Ansible playbooks, integrate PowerShell scripts, troubleshoot failures, and iterate on your work until it’s production-ready. By the end, you’ll have a complete, functioning project that demonstrates the value of combining open-source tools with native scripting to solve real-world challenges.Key topics covered include:Setting up Ansible for Linux and Windows automationWriting Ansible playbooks and roles to orchestrate multi-tier environmentsUsing PowerShell modules and scripts to manage Windows hostsSecuring secrets and credentials with Ansible VaultDesigning repeatable automation workflows for provisioning and configurationTesting, debugging, and scaling automation for long-term maintainabilityCome ready to write YAML and PowerShell, fight with some whitespace in that YAML file, deploy servers, and leave with a repeatable framework for automating your own environment—whether it’s a homelab, a hybrid cloud setup, or an enterprise network.This workshop will be useful for IT Pros whether in their profession roles from help desk to Sysadmins, or even any homelab enthusiasts who wants to go beyond basic automation. No Ansible or PowerShell expertise is required, but some capacity for groaning at bad jokes is encouraged.