PowerShell 5.1 and Desired State Configuration

The Agile DevOps movement is sweeping the industry bringing together the developers and other IT professionals in order to automate the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. Microsoft's PowerShell 5.1, and the Windows Management Framework allows for Distributed State Configuration (DSC) management platform in Windows PowerShell that enables deploying and managing configuration data for software services and managing the environment in which these services run.

This is a rapidly evolving technology with the latest version, 5.1, enjoying many new enhancements all of which are covered in this book.

DSC provides a set of Windows PowerShell language extensions, new Windows PowerShell cmdlets, and resources that you can use to declaratively specify how you want your software environment to be configured. It also provides a means to maintain and manage existing configurations.