Microsoft has released a free ebook titled: "Microsoft System Center: Designing Orchestrator Runbooks". The book which is written by David Ziembicki, Aaron Cushner, Andreas Rynes and Mitch Tulloch contains 182 pages. The book provides a framework for runbook design and IT process automation which will help you to get the most out of System Center 2012 Orchestrator.
We will provide detailed guidance for creating what we call “modular automation” where small, focused pieces of automation are progressively built into larger and more complex solutions. We detail the concept of an automation library, where over time enterprises build a progressively larger library of interoperable runbooks and components. Finally, we will cover advanced scenarios and design patterns for topics like error handling and logging, state management, and parallelism. But before we dive into the details, we’ll begin by setting the stage with a quick overview of System Center 2012 Orchestrator and deployment scenarios.
The book contains the following sections:
- Introducing System Center 2012
- System Center Orchestrator
- Orchestrator architecture and deployment
- Modular runbook design and development
- Orchestrator runbook best practices and patterns
- Modular runbook example
- Calling and executing Orchestrator runbooks