As a Consultant

Fair warning: I am probably off on a rant here about the cloud and how “everything is connected” in terms of automation. This post is going to discuss the recent offensive from Microsoft and their vision about a Hybrid Cloud. I will not do a deep dive into any technical aspects, however do a more overall discussion about the vision and how recent changes brought to us by Windows Server 2012 R2 (and windows management framework 4) can affect us going forward. Background – What do we have and what has happened? From “nowhere” Azure as a PaaS was born. A while before that people started talking about “The Cloud” and things started to move about in terms of Public (The Cloud) and Private Cloud (“On-Premises or On-Prem as it is called nowadays) . Moving forward a bit Microsoft started to launch their vision about Hybrid Cloud, a nice mix of the “best” of the Public and Private cloud. This was even supported with the release of the System Center 2012 suite and together with Windows S...

At TechEd North America 2013 Microsoft has shed some light on the upcoming release of Powershell Version 4. The big news is the DSC or Desired State Configuration feature. Though I should just make a few comments about it. What is it? With DSC you can apply a configuration to your servers/datacenter i matter of minutes from powershell. DSC does not have any dependencies of the underlying infrastructure, however it is a tool to configure it. The scope of the DSC can be a server, a collection of servers or other infrastructure items. How is it delivered? DSC support both PUSH and PULL configurations. You can apply an configuration with a script that targets specific objects (PUSH) or you can provide an URI to the configuration and the scoped selection and the targets will download the configuration from there (PULL) at scheduled intervals which also can be configured. If you use a PULL model, you must configure your target nodes with an URI and an UU...