Nordlicht Reisen GmbH, a fictional travel agency, runs Windows and Linux machines in Azure for the booking portal and two servers in its own data center. The same setting is to apply on all of them, such as a minimum version for encryption, and if someone changes it, that should be noticed or reverted. In addition, the development teams would like to fetch a test environment for themselves without asking the platform group every time. Those are the skills of this lesson: Desired State Configuration (Azure Automation State Configuration, ARM, Bicep, Azure Machine Configuration) and Azure Deployment Environments.
Prior knowledge: You know Bicep, what-if, complete mode and deployment stacks from K3, module 3.2 (especially 3.2.4). The overview of the tools for configuration management and the terms declarative, imperative and idempotent are in lesson 4.12; environments with approval are in lesson 4.7.
Not run against Azure or GitHub; from Microsoft's reference: All commands, YAML and Bicep files and menu paths of this lesson come from Microsoft's documentation and were not run in this course. Names in angle brackets are placeholders.
What Microsoft says today
The exam's skills list names Azure Automation State Configuration and Azure Deployment Environments. Both now carry retirement notices at Microsoft. So first, what the documentation says; you read the retirement date there yourself, because it can change and a course text should not carry a date.
| Service | What the page that was read says |
|---|---|
| Azure Automation State Configuration | A notice at the top of the overview page names a date on which the service will be retired (in the future on the day it was read) and asks you to switch to Azure Machine Configuration by then. Machine Configuration unites features of the DSC extension, of Azure Automation State Configuration and of the most requested features and supports hybrid machines through Arc-enabled servers. According to the same page, Azure Automation DSC for Linux has already been retired. For entries in the portal interface ("Add", "Compose configuration", "Gallery"), the page likewise announces a date of removal. |
| Azure DSC extension for VMs | The pages about the extension likewise name a retirement date (in the future on the day it was read) and ask you to switch to Machine Configuration. |
| Azure Deployment Environments | The overview page and a separate "Retirement guide" name a retirement date (in the future on the day it was read) and ask you to move the processes to a Microsoft service, another Azure service or a partner solution. After that, according to the guide, creating, deploying and other write operations are to be blocked; reading, logs and deleting remain for a limited time for clean-up. |
What follows for you? The exam still asks about the terms, so you learn them here. For the design, this applies: Don't start anything new with Automation State Configuration or Deployment Environments; choose what the pages name as successor or replacement. Check the pages again before every decision; they change.