Building a Desired State Configuration Infrastructure

This is a the kickoff in a series of posts about building a Desired State Configuration (DSC) infrastructure. I’ll be leveraging concepts I’ve been working on as I’ve been building out our DSC deployment at Stack Exchange.

The High Points

• Overview (this post)

• Configuring the Pull Server (REST version)

• Creating Configurations (one of two, two of two)

• Configuring Clients

• Building Custom Resources

• Packaging Custom Resources

• Advanced Client Targeting

I’m starting today with the general overview of what I’m trying to accomplish and why I’m trying to accomplish this. The what and why are critical in determining the how

Need Desired State Configuration Modules?

You’ve probably been hearing about Desired State Configuration from a number of sources (Runas Radio, the PowerScripting Podcast, or the Channel 9 TechEd video for example).  If you haven’t go check out those previously mentioned resources, I’ll wait…
Ok, now that you have a basic understanding of what Desired State Configuration (DSC) is, I have an announcement.

PowerShell.Org is building a repository of DSC modules for the community to use and contribute to.

As I’ve started working with Desired State Configuration, I began building up a repository of modules I would use in configuring my systems.  I started to round them out with some basic documentation and decent logging messages and began pushing them to GitHub.
I’ve also seen several others starting to post some DSC modules on Github and elsewhere.  Since we are very early in the Desired State Configuration lifecycle (it’s still not RTM yet), I would like our community to come together on a central location for our community contributions.  I reached out to Don and the PowerShell.Org team and they graciously offered to host the contributions on the PowerShell.Org GitHub repository.  What that means is that this effort is no longer under the control of one person (me), but owned by the community, by PowerShell.Org.
There’s not much in the repository yet, so if you’ve been experimenting with DSC and would like to share your efforts with the community, feel free to send a pull request (if you’re into the whole GitHub thing) or file an issue on the GitHub site and we’ll figure something out.
There is some basic “Getting Started With Developing DSC Modules” information at the GitHub repository as well.