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)

Pulling DSC Configurations

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
- Carl Sagan

In Chapter 5, Pushing DSC Configurations, we covered how to push a DSC configuration to a target node using Start-DscConfiguration. This method required a lot of steps to be performed each time you provisioned a new target node as well as a few repetitive steps each time you pushed a new DSC configuration to it. Some of it could be scripted away, but it required extra work out of you to accomplish the automation. A DSC pull server provides features that remove the responsibility of automating these steps away from you and performs them itself, saving both time and effort. Through the course of this chapter, we will cover the ways in which DSC pull servers will help you in managing the configuration of your target nodes as well as reducing the amount of work...