Why You Need This
If you are a Linux purist, you might be tempted to skip this. Don't.
In almost every large enterprise, the backend infrastructure is hybrid. It is not a choice between Linux and Windows — it is both, running side by side, and they must interoperate. A web request might hit an Nginx load balancer on Linux, authenticate against Active Directory on Windows, query a SQL Server database on Windows, and write logs to an ELK stack on Linux. All in under 200 milliseconds.
As a DevOps or Platform engineer, you will inevitably need to query Active Directory for user accounts, debug a legacy .NET application running on IIS, automate Windows patching via PowerShell, or configure firewall rules on a Windows Server. Ignoring Windows leaves a significant blind spot in your engineering capability — and interviewers at enterprise companies will probe exactly this gap.
What this lesson covers:
- Active Directory: identity and access management at scale
- The Windows Registry: how configuration works without text files
- NTFS permissions: a more complex ACL model than Linux
- PowerShell: an object-based shell that is genuinely more powerful than Bash for structured data
- IIS and RDP: the Windows equivalents of Nginx and SSH