Googlers reveal code they use for mass Windows deployments

With close to 60,000 employees, Google/Alphabet has an awful lot of desktops, laptops, notebooks, tablets and phones to support, and it's taken the covers off one of the tools that helps it do that.

Glazier, which landed at GitHub yesterday, helps its sysadmins automate Microsoft Windows installations.

As the documentation explains, Glazier follows the very best traditions of a sysadmin who has to work in bulk: imaging is configured entirely in text files, with the kind of source control coders like – “peer review, change history, rollback/forward” for example.

Data (images as well as configurations) is distributed over HTTPS, so if you're running a small shop, you can set up a free Web server to push out config images, while at the other end of the scale, Glazier can be deployed on a cloud-scale content distribution network (CDN) if necessary.

Written in Python, Glazier is still very much a work-in-progress (one contributor to the mailing list complained it won't work on Linux yet).

The Googler who posted it, Matt LaPlante, notes that it needs better documentation, something that's “near the top of our TODO list”.

It should be noted that the Apache-licenced project isn't an official Google product. ®