Book Image

Learning PowerShell DSC - Second Edition

By : James Pogran
Book Image

Learning PowerShell DSC - Second Edition

By: James Pogran

Overview of this book

The main goal of this book is to teach you to configure, deploy, and manage your system using the new features of PowerShell v5/v6 DSC. This book begins with the basics of PowerShell Desired State Configuration, covering its architecture and components. It familiarizes you with the set of Windows PowerShell language extensions and new Windows PowerShell commands that make up DSC. Then it helps you create DSC custom resources and work with DSC configurations with the help of practical examples. Finally, it describes how to deploy configuration data using PowerShell DSC. Throughout this book, we will be focusing on concepts such as building configurations with parameters, the local configuration manager, and testing and restoring configurations using PowerShell DSC. By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy a real-world application end-to-end and will be familiar enough with the powerful Desired State Configuration platform to achieve continuous delivery and efficiently and easily manage and deploy data for systems.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

DSC Architecture

"As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past for a future which is essentially unknown."
– Herman Foster

In the last chapter, we covered what PowerShell DSC is and how it fits into a continuous delivery and DevOps process. DSC uses PowerShell language extensions to define configuration files that express the expected state of a target node. We know that DSC uses DSC resources to determine whether the current state of the target node matches the expected state and that these resources know how to change the current state to the expected state.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Push and pull management
  • General workflow
  • Local configuration manager
  • DSC pull server
  • Deployment considerations