Blog Post

Azure Governance and Management Blog
1 MIN READ

Coming soon: guest configuration renames to machine configuration

jodiboone's avatar
jodiboone
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jun 16, 2022

In this post we will give you additional insight into the name change and a status update on key initiatives.

 

Since the launch of guest configuration in 2018, the product has been a key piece of many Azure security and Azure governance scenarios. The service enables customers to audit and report on configuration settings inside machines, at cloud scale. This past year, we have been working to support customers more holistically, shipping the public preview of  “Apply and Monitor” and “Apply and Autocorrect” assignment types, and are working hard on the upcoming GA of these capabilities.

 

We have been listening to our customers as well as the community and are excited to announce a name that highlights the current and future capabilities of our service. Guest configuration will become machine configuration. In addition to the name change, we are moving under the Automanage brand umbrella to reinforce the message that the goal of machine configuration is to reduce op-ex and customer burden in managing their Windows and Linux machines both in Azure and on-premises. It is important to note that the current experience within policy will not change. Customers will still be able to apply machine configurations at scale through policy assignments as they have thus far. 

 

This rebranding will go live soon in the Azure portal as well as our documentation. More information to come soon about the GA of our enforcement capabilities.

Updated Jun 16, 2022
Version 1.0

2 Comments

  • I've been quite excited for this feature. I've been building a pipeline to ingest ps1 dsc configs and go through all of the steps (compile, sign, test, publish) then pass the values to our terraform deployments so we can apply small configs based on vm tags. I've got some plans to make my work more accessible to the community at some point in the near future 🙂

    Hopefully this rename doesn't include a rework of the commands again. It was a good bit of work figuring out what happened/changed when they were reworked a couple of months back. I had to go into the documentation history to figure out what had changed. I pinned my documentation through web archive this time around to make it easier to maintain. The banner is https://web.archive.org/web/20220617183238/https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/policy/how-to/guest-configuration-create is the only reason I saw this update.

  • This is awesome, so excited to see the power of Machine Configuration coupled with Azure Automanage! Can't wait to leverage Machine Configuration's new autocorrect and monitor capabilities.