How to automate the installation of windows components and the deployment of an IIS application?

Question

System administration

Hello everyone,
I'm not very strong in administering windows servers, but for work I often have to deploy an application written in asp.net. For the application to work correctly, you need to install certain features and server roles (including IIS itself). Then you need to create and configure the application in IIS. Are there ways to automate this process (PowerShell?)? Preferably taking into account different versions (2008, 2012, 2016).
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Just for these purposes, MS created the PowerShell Desaired State Configuration (DSC), this is such an analogue of Puppet or Ansible from MS.
The principle of its operation is as follows:
using PowerShell, using DSC resources, you describe what you want to get as a result and form a configuration file in MOF format. Then, on the required machines, execute the configuration application command:
DSC resource is a macro command that has 2 main functions Test and Config (the names are arbitrary). First, the Test function determines the current state of the system and generates a list of differences from the required one. The Config command then returns to the state described in the configuration.
There are many possibilities in the configuration to describe the order in which resources are applied, if they need to be executed in a certain sequence. You can run part of the commands in parallel, but execute the next step only after they complete.
There is a rather crude, and sharpened for the Azure cloud, centralized configuration management system.