Introduction to Declarative MDM

Apple's mobile device management (MDM) protocol is an essential part of maintaining macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS devices at companies, schools and institutions. In its current form, MDM management is designed around a model of the MDM management service telling the managed devices what to do and the managed devices doing it, with the desired state logic residing on the MDM management service's end.
Declarative device management (DDM) introduces a substantial change to this management model, with the individual devices being granted more autonomy to enforce configuration changes and take actions within a defined set of policies provided by the management server. This new approach also enables devices to proactively send status changes back to the management service in place of needing to wait for the management service to poll the device. The overall result is that device information gets reported back more quickly, policies subsequently can be applied faster, while also reducing the load on the management service because of the reduced communication need between the managed devices and management service.
This session will discuss how MDM works today without declarative device management, provide an introduction to DDM and discuss how DDM will add capabilities to device management.