Configuration Management on Windows Server—Desired State Configuration
LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.
The LISA conference has long served as the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA14 program recognized the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and developed a highly-curated program around 5 key topics: Systems Engineering, Security, Culture, DevOps, and Monitoring/Metrics. The program included 22 half- and full-day training sessions; 10 workshops; and a conference program consisting of 50 invited talks, panels, refereed paper presentations, and mini-tutorials.
Steven Murawski, Chef
Steven Murawski, Chef
Steven is a Technical Community Manager for Chef and a Microsoft MVP in PowerShell. Steven is a co-host of the Ops All The Things podcast.
author = {Steven Murawski},
title = {Configuration Management on Windows {Server{\textemdash}Desired} State Configuration},
year = {2014},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = nov
}
Desired State Configuration allows you to declaratively describe the end state of a Windows Server system. In this tutorial, we'll discuss the infrastructure for DSC, we'll learn how to create configurations and deploy them (including managing secrets like passwords). Previous PowerShell experience is helpful, but not required.
Systems administrators who have to deploy and manage Windows servers.
Attendees will take back an understanding of the state of configuration management on Windows, techniques for dealing with hard problems like secure password management, and the strengths and weaknesses of the new configuration management agent on Windows servers.
- The state of configuration management on Windows Server.
- The architecture of Desired State Configuration.
- Patterns for dealing with secure credential provisioning.
- The basics of how to write a Desired State Configuration document.
