A lot of shops are going to desired state configuration tools, like Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, Windows PowerShell DSC, etc., to enable rapid deployment of systems and to reduce drift. I looked through support.sas.com and Google and haven't seen any mention of SAS and desired state configuration tools, so I thought I would float the question. Does SAS have (or intend to produce) modules, cookbooks, or other packages that will allow SAS Administrators to declare a desired state and let the "automagic" system make it so? For instance, it would be great to have, say, a Puppet manifest that contains all user definitions with information like groups they should (or should not) belong to, accounts, etc., that my team would update and run whenever we add or remove a user from the system or a group. Running the manifest through Puppet would make the necessary changes to Metadata to make the environment resemble the desired state. A different manifest file could control server mappings, connections, and such, while a third could handle libraries. This would get us out of the business of either pointing-and-clicking our way through the wizards (which hurts with over a thousand users and almost as many libraries) or writing our own Bash-and-SAS tools to do it automate it ourselves (which is a support headache). Similar concepts apply to Chef cookbooks, PowerShell DSC definitions, et al. Producing such a package as the vendor would mean that the user community doesn't have to write the package on a case-by-case basis for their own systems, that it follows SAS' own best-practices and advice, and it would be a nice advertising point showing that SAS is keeping up with emerging trends to simplify systems automation at scale. This is mainly for my own curiosity. Thanks!
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