What is the motivation of Desired State Configuration?

Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines are a very foundational and fundamental resource in Cloud Computing. Deploying virtual machines gives you more flexibility and control over your cloud infrastructure and services, however, it also means you have more responsibility to maintain and configure these resources. This course gives you an overview of why use virtual machines as well as how to create, configure, and monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager.

Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines: What You'll Learn

Lesson	What you'll learn
Overview	Overview of the course and the Learning Objectives
What is a Virtual Machine?	Understand what are Azure Virtual Machines and what workloads are ideal for VMs
Creating and Connecting to Azure VMs	Learn to deploy Windows and Linux VMs as well as how to connect to these VMs
Scaling Azure Virtual Machines	Understand VM scaling, load-balancing, and Availability Sets in Azure Resource Manager
Configuration Management	Understand the basic concepts of Desired State Configuration and the options available to Azure VMs
Design and Implement VM Storage	Gain an understanding of the underlying Storage options available to VMs as well as Encryption
Configure Monitoring & Alerts for Azure VMs	Learn to monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager as well as configure alerts.
Summary	Course summary and conclusion

 

Configuration Management deals with establishing a baseline, high-level standard of quality for all the resources in your environment. In our case, we want to maintain the highest level of quality and serviceability of our virtual machines. Any deviation from this standard of quality should be quickly mitigated and resolved to return back to our baseline standard of quality. As we’ll see, Azure has several tools available including 3rd-party tools to implement this type of Configuration Management. It’s no secret that having a healthy environment saves money. Configuration Management helps to not only reduce cost but also make it easier to predict the cost of maintaining your IT environment.