Five Questions: Windows Automation
For #AskAnsible posts, we interview Ansible experts on IT automation topics and ask them to share their direct experiences building automation solutions.
In this post, I’ve asked Matt Davis five questions about Ansible for Windows automation.
Matt Davis is a Senior Principal Software Engineer for Ansible, focused on Ansible's Windows support. He has over 20 years experience in software engineering, architecture and operations at companies large and small. An avid musician, maker and home hacker, Matt lives with his wife and daughter in Beaverton, Oregon. You can follow him on Twitter at @mattdavispdx.
1. How is Ansible for Windows different than System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or Powershell Desired State Configuration (DSC)?
Matt: SCCM is generally considered a legacy workstation-flavored management technology, dating from the mid 1990s (though many places use it for server management, too). It requires agents on the managed hosts, which must be installed, configured and kept up-to-date. SCCM executes many operations locally and asynchronously from the server, so it's often difficult to orchestrate interdependent changes across hosts, and to reason about the overall system state at any point in time as part of larger deployments.
DSC is a much more modern management technology, supporting both an Continue reading