A DSC pull server is an IIS website that exposes an OData endpoint that responds to requests from the LCM configured on each target node and provides DSC configuration files and DSC resources for download. That was a lot of acronyms and buzzwords, so let's take this one by one.

IIS is an acronym for Internet Information Services, which is the set of components that allows you to host websites on a Windows server. OData is an acronym for Open Data Protocol, which defines a standard for querying and consuming RESTful APIs. Explaining websites, REST, and APIs is a little more than what we can do here in this book, and you do not have to really know all these to use DSC. For the purposes of this book, think of API as the programmatic way the LCM on the target nodes asks the pull server what to do.

One last thing to cover before we move on. A DSC pull server can be configured to use Server Message Block (SMB) shares instead of HTTP to distribute MOF files and DSC resources. This changes the distribution mechanism of DSC Resources and MOF files, but not how the DSC server works. We will get into a more detailed explanation in Chapter 6, Pulling DSC Configurations.