Now that we have covered both how deployments work (push and pull) in DSC and the workflow (authoring, staging, and execution) for using DSC, we will pause here for a moment to discuss the differences between configuration files and configuration data.

It is important to understand the concept of the separation of the what from the where that we covered in Chapter 1, Introduction to PowerShell DSC, when considering how to deploy servers, applications, and environments using DSC.

The DSC configuration blocks contain the entirety of the expected state of the target node. The DSL syntax used to describe the state is expressed in one configuration file in a near list format. It expresses all configuration points of the target system and is able to express dependencies between configuration points.

DSC configuration data is separated from DSC configuration files to reduce variance and duplication. Some points that are considered data are software version numbers, file path locations...