Azure Powershell DSC or Ansible

Question

I wanted to find out what are you using for Desired State Configuration on your end. I am thinking to start introducing Azure Powershell DSC or Ansible for DSC of our on-prem environment and cloud environment. Would you have any recommendations? I am turning more towards Ansible but it would be nice to get to know other people opinion.

Answer 1

PowerShell Desired State Configuration:

Pro's

• Great support for Microsoft Technologies (IIS, Exchange, SharePoint, etc.)

Con's

• OS and PowerShell Version requirements can become prohibitive.
• WinRM and the LCM can be flakey requiring fiddling around restarting services to get it working.
• Opensource Ecosystem isn't as strong.

Ansible:

Pro's

• Huge Open-source ecosystem around Ansible, with many ways of doing one task.
• Support for a wide range of technologies, enabling you to use Ansible YAML for vSphere, Azure, AWS, etc.
• Easy to hire people with Ansible experience.

Con's

• Poor support for the nitty-gritty of Microsoft Products, however, you can use the win_dsc module to call DSC from Ansible.
• Ansible is becoming less important with the advent of Cloud, Kubernetes and Terraform.

Personally, I use DSC for my workstation and that's it now. Previously I used it to bootstrap MongoDB and Redis clusters but eventually switched to Ansible because it meant throwing away the hard to maintain DSC and using open-source Ansible modules from Galaxy.