People that are coming from Linux Environment would be already familiar  with such tools like Puppet, Chef and etc, bu those who has come from poor Windows environment, especially System Administrators / Engineers / BAU people – probably would  think that GUI and manual operations would be wit them forever 🙂

Unfortunatly it’s all cost money, services and platforms change rapidly. Most of the companies would need to be able to handle this changes to avoid becoming a dinosaurs!

So! How then PowerShell and DSC can help? Oh, you can’t even imagine! It is all becoming a magic!

Once Company have decided to run a project – they need an infrastructure to run it. And not just a server (Bare Metal, On-premises or pure Cloud VM ), but a set of IaaS, PaaS elements that will represent the service.

What is more important – they will need  a bunch of them! And they should be scalable and you may need to re-deploy them from scratch.

Someone will say – to much work, but NOT! Just because of the DSC! 

DSC – Desired State Configuration. That is just a description what you want to see on the servers  you have already got or you want to get as a part of this configuration.

Once this description is ready – it is time for magic (if you are lucky 🙂 ) or time to become a magician! What does it mean? Oh that is easy!

When you want the magic to happen – something need to know how to do it. Lots of people share that magic books (modules) on GitHub and they also available through the PowerShell Gallery .

I’m going to post later details how to benefit from both of this resources and what problems I have had, but as for not I’ll recommend to look for the following videos:

My favorite sessions with Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and inventor of PowerShell, along with Windows PowerShell MVP Jason Helmick on MVA and Channel9 (links below) would give you a good understanding of the DSC if you are not yet familiar with it.

Those videos would also give you an idea what to do if you can’t find the magic that will help you 🙂 It will be easy  to create your own magic book! If you will be brave enough – you can even share it with the public:)

Let’s rock the magic!

Resources to visit:

  • http://powershell.org/
  • https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/dsc/overview
  • https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/
  • https://mva.microsoft.com/en-us/training-courses/getting-started-with-powershell-desired-state-configuration-dsc–8672
  • https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Advanced-PowerShell-Desired-State-Configuration-DSC-and-Custom-Resources