After having shocked the world by releasing Visual Studio Code for Linux, Microsoft had the pleasure of announcing today the immediate availability for download of PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for GNU/Linux operating systems.

Microsoft's PowerShell DSC (Desired State Configuration) is an open source platform that was designed from the offset to let system administrators manage the configuration of both Linux and Windows workloads with a familiar PowerShell interface.

The software is currently supported for a wide variety of Linux server operating systems, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5/6/7, CentOS 5/6/7, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10/11/12, Debian GNU/Linux 6 and 7, Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS and 14.04 LTS, and Oracle Enterprise Linux 5/6/7.

"We are pleased to announce that PowerShell Desired State Configuration for Linux," says Kris Bash on behalf of Microsoft. "Bringing DSC to Linux is another step in Microsoft’s broader commitment to common management of heterogeneous assets in your datacenter or the public cloud."

Highlights of PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for Linux

While this is the first version of PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for Linux, it already includes some attractive features, such as built-in resources for basic Linux configuration operations and Partial Configuration support in Pull mode.

Additionally, the software offers Pull (HTTP/HTTPS) and Push (WS-Man) modes for distributing configurations across platforms, and automatic protection against configuration drift, which is controlled by the ConfigurationMode options in the Meta Configuration.

Among the built-in resources offered by PowerShell DSC for Linux, we can mention nxArchive, nxEnvironment, nxFile, nxFileLine, nxGroup, nxPackage, nxScript, nxService, nxSshAuthorizedKeys, and nxUser.

PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for Linux is available for download for free today, as binary packages for DEB and RPM-based operating systems. Please note that it depends on the OMI server 1.0.8-1 component, which is also available for free. The source code of PowerShell DSC for Linux is also available, and so is a very informative Getting Started guide too.