Ravikanth C

Cloud and Infrastructure Technologist, Author, Microsoft MVP, Public Speaker, and Innovator

Ravikanth is a Distinguished Member Technical Staff at Dell EMC working on Software-defined Storage and Hybrid Cloud architectures. He is a published author and an innovator with many granted patents and pending applications. He is a multi-year recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in Cloud and Data Center Management. Ravikanth is the founder of PowerShell Magazine and leads Bangalore IT Pro and Bangalore PowerShell User Groups.

290 Posts by this author

Announcing PowerShell, DevOps, and Cloud Conference 2021

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
26 Jul, 2021
- Conferences

PowerShell Conference Asia 2019 was a huge success. The attendee turnout was never like before. We had 200+ attendees and speakers worldwide spend three days in Bangalore to share their PowerShell expertise.

A reader counter using PowerShell, Azure functions, and table storage

Ravikanth C
7 Min To Read
24 May, 2021

We have recently moved PowerShell Magazine from WordPress to Hugo static pages. One downside of this move is that we miss a few features that come by default in WordPress.

A YAML primer for administrators

Ravikanth C
11 Min To Read
15 May, 2021
- Yaml

In today’s cloud and agile infrastructure world, JSON and YAML play a major role in describing the infrastructure and data exchange.

Ravikanth C
5 Min To Read
03 May, 2021

We just announced moving PowerShell Magazine from WordPress platform to a statically generated GitHub pages based platform. We use Hugo to compile markdown content to HTML and host that on GitHub pages.

The all new PowerShell Magazine is here and more to come!

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
03 May, 2021
- News

This one took a while but we finally moved to a new home! No more painful management of plugins and updates to PHP.

Getting Started with PSArm

In the first part of this series, you learned about PSArm – a PowerShell embedded DSL – that you can use to declaratively define your Azure infrastructure and generate an ARM template.

PSArm - PowerShell DSL For Azure Resource Manager - Introduction

Those who worked on Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates understand that complexity of writing and making sure the template works as expected becomes very complicated as the complexity of a deployment grows.

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
23 Mar, 2020
- Modules

Calendarific offers a webservice for listing holidays from different countries. They also have an API that can be used by developers to implement this holiday queries in the their own applications.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
12 Mar, 2020
- Conferences

PowerShell Conference Asia 2019 was held in Bangalore (India). It was such a great event and fun hosting it here.

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
10 Feb, 2020
- Debugging

In the last two or three months, I have been busy working on a complete end to end deployment automation solution and been writing lot of PowerShell code.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
07 Feb, 2020
- Modules

In any method of automation secrets management is a very critical part. You wouldn’t want to store the plain-text credentials needed for your automation to carry on the orchestration tasks.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
30 Jan, 2020
- Scripts

If you have ever worked with the Test-Cluster command in the failover clustering module, you will know that this command generates an HTML report.

Ravikanth C
4 Min To Read
09 Sep, 2019
- Modules

In my previous job, I worked at a customer site that had multiple Windows and Unix Servers. One of the every day tasks was to report the disk space utilization from these servers.

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
03 Sep, 2019
- Modules

I create HTTP REST APIs a lot in my proof-of-concept work and I generally use the .NET HTTPListener class for this purpose.

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
21 Aug, 2019
- Modules

Ever wanted to generate HTML documents dynamically? Until now, you had to statically code the HTML tags in the PowerShell scripts and ensure you open and close all needed HTML elements.

Ravikanth C
1 Min To Read
15 Jul, 2019
- Dev ops

I was recently featured on the Latest Shiny Podcast (@l8istsh9y) hosted by Rob Hirschfeld and Stephen Spector. I came across their podcast a while ago and listened to their last two episodes.

Ravikanth C
1 Min To Read
11 Jul, 2019
- Modules
- Pester

In the earlier parts of this series, I introduced you to the concepts and design of Garuda framework. I demonstrated a proof-of-concept version of this at PowerShell Conference Europe.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
10 Jul, 2019
- Conferences

I have been talking to several automation engineers (for a vacant position) and realized there are many women who have been doing some great work in the area of infrastructure automation.

Ravikanth C
5 Min To Read
24 Jun, 2019
- Dev ops
- Pester

In the first part of this series, I mentioned the reasoning behind starting development of a new framework for operations validation.

Ravikanth C
1 Min To Read
18 Jun, 2019
- Modules

The Public APIs repository on GitHub has a list of free APIs that you can use in software and web development.

Ravikanth C
8 Min To Read
17 Jun, 2019

Operations validation using PowerShell and Pester has been one of my favorite topics and I have both personal and professional interest in this area.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
14 Jun, 2019
- Tips and tricks

While working on a module that interacts with REST API, I came across a situation where I had to generate query strings.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
09 Apr, 2019
- Conferences

PowerShell Conference Asia 2019 edition will be in Bangalore, India. We closed our CFP towards end of February and finalized (partially) a great set of International PowerShell Experts.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
19 Feb, 2019
- Modules

I had published a PowerShell DSC resource module, last month, called WindowsAdminCenterDsc that uses the PowerShell module that was made available with Windows Admin Center version 1812.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
31 Jan, 2019
- Modules

Windows Admin Center (WAC) is the new web-based management application for managing Windows Servers, Failover Clusters, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) clusters, and Windows 10 PCs.

Ravikanth C
1 Min To Read
01 Jan, 2019
- Conferences

We announced back in October that the next edition of PowerShell Conference Asia will be hosted in Bangalore (India) and is scheduled to happen from 19th to 21st September 2019.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
13 Nov, 2018
- Modules

The Redfish specification supports event mechanism through which the target Redfish devices can send events from different components in the system to an event listener.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
14 Aug, 2018
- Conferences

The PowerShell Conference Asia resumes for its 4th year this October, bringing speakers from Asia and around the world to deliver in-depth PowerShell and DevOps sessions.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
03 Apr, 2018

The SHiPS module has several use cases with structured data. I have written a few proof-of-concept modules using SHiPS to understand how it works and try out different design patterns.

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
22 Jan, 2018
- Azure
- Azure dev test

Unless you were living under a rock, PowerShell Core general availability isn’t any breaking news. PowerShell Core is a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and macOS) automation and configuration tool/framework that works well with your existing tools and is optimized for dealing with structured data (e.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
08 Jan, 2018
- Modules

If you have ever used Node.js, the packages.json file is used to specify the module dependencies. Here is an example:

Ravikanth C
4 Min To Read
05 Jan, 2018
- Dev ops
- Power shell dsc

When we talk about applications or software deployed in the infrastructure, we simply refer to the version of the application or software running in the infrastructure.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
04 Jan, 2018
- Modules
- Power shell dsc

At times we need to set the physical adapter advanced properties such as VLAN ID. This can be done using the Set-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty cmdlet.

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
03 Jan, 2018
- Power shell dsc
- Modules

As a part of larger hyper-converged infrastructure (based on S2D) configuration automation using PowerShell DSC, I have written quite a few new DSC resource modules.

Ravikanth C
1 Min To Read
02 Jan, 2018
- Modules
- Shi ps

In an earlier article, I had written about a PowerShell provider for Failover Clusters written using the SHiPS provider framework. I have been experimenting with this a bit and made a few more providers.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
21 Dec, 2017
- Modules
- Shi ps

Simple Hierarchy in PowerShell (SHiPS) is a module that simplifies implementing PowerShell providers. If you are new to PowerShell providers, a PowerShell provider allows any data store to be exposed like a file system as if it were a mounted drive.

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
19 Dec, 2017
- Power shell dsc
- Modules

I have been working on the FailoverClusterDsc resource module and finally had the chance to add some examples and make the repository public.

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
28 Jun, 2017

In one of my earlier articles here, I wrote about the Infrastructure Blueprints project. Over the weekend, I published an update this project.

Ravikanth C
7 Min To Read
27 Jun, 2017
- Power shell dsc

If you have ever used the Publish-AzureRmVMDscConfiguration cmdlet in the Azure PowerShell tools, you may know already that this command discovers module dependencies for a configuration and packages all dependencies along with the configuration as a zip archive.

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
24 May, 2017
- Dev ops
- Power shell dsc

In the last part of this series, we looked at why resource granularity is important. In this part, we will see the difference between configuration items and orchestration steps.

Ravikanth C
6 Min To Read
23 May, 2017
- Dev ops
- Power shell dsc

This is the first article in the #PSDSC Doing It Right series. This series of articles will introduce you to some of the best practices we have learned through some real-world implementations of PowerShell DSC-based configuration management.

Ravikanth C
5 Min To Read
15 May, 2017
- Dev ops
- Power shell dsc

A while ago, I wrote an article to introduce Infrastructure Blueprints. Today’s post is about a more refined version of that project.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
24 Oct, 2016

I just finished testing and publishing the cHyper-V PowerShell DSC resource module to the PowerShell Gallery. I took some time to make changes to this module–fix bugs and add new functionality.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
22 Aug, 2016

Update: The PowerShell on Linux artifact is now available in official Azure DTL artifact repository. Bartek and Ben have written a great introduction article on open source PowerShell.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
15 Aug, 2016
- News
- Conferences

PowerShell Conference Asia is back. After a successful last year, we are back with a really exciting line up of sessions and speakers.

Ravikanth C
5 Min To Read
08 Jun, 2016
- Power shell dsc
- Vs code

I keep re-building my lab machines and in the process I rebuild my development virtual machines. One of the items that gets reinstalled all the time is Visual Studio Code editor.

Ravikanth C
4 Min To Read
13 May, 2016
- Dev ops
- Power shell dsc

This part of the series is long due after the first post on DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, and PowerShell DSC. Thanks to PowerShell Conference Europe, I was able to complete what I wanted to publish on GitHub as an example for this article.

Ravikanth C
1 Min To Read
13 May, 2016
- News
- Conferences

Session recordings – both videos and screencasts – from PowerShell Conference Europe 2016 are now available. It may be a couple of days before all sessions appear in the playlist.

Ravikanth C
1 Min To Read
12 May, 2016
- Interviews

This post is a bit delayed, but PowerShell Conference Europe 2016 was a blast. It’s a true global conference with both attendees and speakers from four different continents.

Ravikanth C
2 Min To Read
11 May, 2016
- Tips and tricks

Note: This tip requires PowerShell 4.0 or later. Before PowerShell 4.0, if we had to convert the hash table in a PSD1 file into an object representation, we either used the Import-LocalizedData cmdlet (not really meant for this purpose) or other means.

Ravikanth C
4 Min To Read
06 May, 2016
- Modules

I work at the command line most of the time and sometimes I find moving to certain folders very tedious and requires lot of typing (even with tab-completion).

Ravikanth C
4 Min To Read
22 Apr, 2016
- Power shell dsc

While at the PowerShell Conference EU, we had some very good discussions around PowerShell and PowerShell DSC. A few questions came up about DSC composite resources and how they are being used.

Ravikanth C
4 Min To Read
12 Jan, 2016
- News
- Conferences

PowerShell is not just a simple little script automation language anymore. It has transitioned into true DNA for Microsoft server technology, and with workflows and DSC forms the platform for “infrastructure as code”.

Ravikanth C
6 Min To Read
05 Jan, 2016
- Dev ops
- Power shell dsc

DevOps is the new cool thing (at least in the Windows world) everyone is talking about and the IT professionals (some of us at least) just give a blank stare every time the DevOps discussion comes up.

Ravikanth C
3 Min To Read
07 Dec, 2015
- Hyper v
- Power shell dsc

Earlier this year, I released a bunch of DSC resources packaged as cHyper-V resource module. The resources are focused on configuring Hyper-V networking.

Deploy Custom Azure Automation Integration Modules Using ARM Templates

Update: Earlier generic linked template for deploying modules was removed and it was breaking my ARM template. I published two linked templates in my ARMSeries repo that can be used to deploy modules to Azure Automation accounts.

Ravikanth C
1 Min To Read
18 Nov, 2015
- News
- Vs code

If you are not watching #VisualStudio #Connect2015, you are certainly missing a lot. Because … @ScottGu just announced a lot of new features including extension support in Visual Studio Code.

Ravikanth C
1 Min To Read
20 Oct, 2015
- Interviews