Powershell DSC (Desired State Configuration) Summary

Before writing about DSC, I want to recommend a video. Few days ago I saw this video about Visio Powershell, it is really cool how this guy uses Powershell to manage their Visio diagrams, it is a must watch.

Last month was the month of the DSC (Desired State Configuration), there are a lot of posts and discussions about this topic, especially after the Technet America 2014 and I am going to make a little selection of these posts and videos.

DSC is a set of cmdlets and objects to setup, manage and configure systems via Powershell.

First release of DSC is available in Windows 8.1 and 2012 R2 and there is a preview with new cmdlets called Windows Management Framework 5 Preview – May 2014. There even is an experimental version for managing Linux computers via OMI and DSC, it was inconceivable few years ago. As a Microsoft user I am happy that they open their systems to open source and mixed environments, maybe Azure and cloud computing have something to do with it ;).

Coming back to DSC, one of the "star" cmdlets in the new preview is PowerShellGet, which is something like, apt-get or yum in Linux work and allows you to download directly from Internet or from local repositories software packages, and it is pretty cool to deploy new systems with DSC scripts, because it downloads and installs all the apps that the user needs.

I am sure that DSC is going to be one of the main-characters in the future of cloud automation into Microsoft environments and mixed environments where Windows are majority.

To know more about DSC, here are some videos and documents about it.

Desired State Configuration in Windows Server 2012 R2 PowerShell this video with Jeffrey Snover talks about first steps with DSC, here is a good doc for a start too.