Introduction To Microsoft Azure Automation

Microsoft Azure is a very aggressive automation solution providing services to users via Azure Automation Service, by which we can automate  the frequent periodic repeating tasks of the cloud. It will definitely save the users and dev ops time. The users can regularly administer all tasks in Azure and also schedule that all the tasks using so many options are available in Azure.

Microsoft Azure provides you two ways of automation.

• Runbook
• Desired State Configuration

Runbook is basically a set of tasks which is mentioned which will perform some specific automation process in Microsoft Azure Automation Service. It will be simple also like if you want to manage or start VMs in Azure or Web Apps in Azure or you want to create some logging or want to manage log entries etc. or use nested runbooks or a collection of small runbooks you can manage the runbooks in some flow and which will create some complex automation process over the multiple services and resources of Azure also you can integrate automation on some on premises environment also.



In Microsoft Azure runbooks automations are based on PowerShell and/or PowerShell WorkFlows. So Runbooks are powerful because of what we can do using PowerShell that we can also do on runbooks and many more things in Automation using runbooks. If any user has applications API enabled, that would also be easy to manage using runbooks and applications have PowerShell modules that we can also load in runbook and Azure Automation. We can also include those cmds in our runbooks. Azure runbooks can work with any cloud resources or any external resources which we can access in the cloud.



In Microsoft Azure Automation Service we can create and design our own runbooks simply. Azure Runbook has four types in Azure,

• Graphical
• Graphical PowerShell WorkFlow
• PowerShell
• PowerShell WorkFlow
  
  
  
  

In the above two Graphical and Graphical PowerShell WorkFlow Microsoft Azure provides us with a Graphical Editor in which we can define our steps and we can create we can edit etc.

And the last two PowerShell and PowerShell workflows are text editor based scripts available where we can create and edit runbook.

Also Microsoft Azure Automation provides you a variety of Runbook Galleries integrated with your Automation service, which you can directly import and work on.



In the below snapshot you can see Graphical Runbook Designer where you can design your runbook using cmdlets, you can set parameters and manage assets, and also you can control runbooks.



And the below snapshot is the output of my runbook; when I run it you can see the output and also you can check the runbook history logs.



In my upcoming article I will show you how you can create your runbook, import your runbook, and how you can perform automation in azure, also in upcoming articles I will show you how you can work with desired state configuration scripts.