Desired State Configuration is a PowerShell extension that ships with Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1. Why is PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) so cool. Well to borrow from this Technet Blog here are a few reasons.

• First of all declaring a DSC configuration is PowerShell based. So you can leverage all your PowerShell skills to not only define a configuration, but also for troubleshooting.
• DSC is designed to support “continuous deployments” which means that you can deploy your configuration over and over without breaking anything
• When a DSC configuration is being applied only those settings which do not match will be set, the rest will be skipped which can result in a faster deployment time
• You can separate the configuration data from the logic of your configuration so that you can reuse your configuration data for different resources, nodes, and configurations.
• DSC can be used on-premise, in a public or in a private Cloud environment. You just need either Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows 8.1 and local administrator permissions to execute the DSC PowerShell scripts
• You can integrate DSC with any Microsoft or non-Microsoft solutions as long as you can execute a PowerShell script on the target system.

To learn more about DSC, you can visit the MVA Jumpstart with the Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and inventor of PowerShell, along with Windows PowerShell MVP Jason Helmick, You can also view this session that I attended at TechED 2014 on DSC presented by Don Jones.