Microsoft has published a free ebook titled:”Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Automation“. The book which contains 113 pages introduces a fairly new feature of Microsoft Azure called Azure Automation. Using a highly scalable workflow execution environment, Azure Automation allows you to orchestrate frequent deployment and life cycle management tasks using runbooks based on Windows PowerShell Workflow functionality. These runbooks are stored in and backed up by Azure. By automating runbooks, you can greatly minimize the occurrence of errors when carrying out repeated tasks and process automation.
The book contains the following sections:
- Introduction to Azure Automation
- Runbook management
- Assets
- Runbook deployment
- Azure Script Center, library, and community
- Best practices in using Azure Automation
- Scenarios