Level: Introductory Intermediate
Business needs IT to be more responsive than ever. Waiting six weeks for new environments or other lengthy delays in provisioning new machines or updating existing services is becoming a detriment to IT departments across industries and government.
Server deployment and configuration is one of the biggest sources of delay. Configuration documentation is often out of date or missing and not due to any particular malicious action or intentional neglect on the part of IT Pros.
Declarative configuration management systems change that dynamic. Tools like Chef and Desired State Configuration offer a way to document systems in a readable manner that is also executable. The benefit of executable documentation is that it's always up to date, since that's what'srunning on machines in active use. These systems also prevent configuration drift, keeping them configured as the IT Pro's have described.
Chef offers a robust platform and rich ecosystem of tools and patterns for effectively managing server configurations. Desired State Configuration (DSC) provides Windows Server with a common API for configuration management tasks. Chef can natively leverage DSC resources, offering you the best of both platforms. Join me for this hands-on, interactive session and use Chef and DSC to configure and manage a custom workload running on Windows Server.
You will learn:
- How to use Chef to configure a fresh Windows Server machine
- How to take the machine from a base install using Chef and Desired State Configuration (DSC) to configure various roles and features required to deploy a custom application
- How to use Chef and DSC to migrate to a newer version of the application
- How to use Chef and DSC to bring your machine back into compliance after unauthorized changes are made manually