- Welcome to Azure Essentials.
In the next few minutes, we'll explore
your automation options as standalone capabilities
and across services in Azure.
Azure offers a variety of services,
from Runbook automation and resource manager templates
to automated commands available in PowerShell
or Azure CLI and beyond, as well as capabilities
built directly into services and workloads,
like scaling, scheduling, eventing, and more.
Azure automation itself is a Software as a Service,
or SaaS application within Azure.
It allows you to use Runbooks
to automate processes and it can be used
to orchestrate other automation options within Azure.
Runbooks can be authored using
PowerShell, graphical, or Python tools.
And these can be executed in Azure
via hybrid workers for scenarios outside of Azure.
You can get started with pre-configured,
community-contributed Runbooks in the Runbook gallery,
where you'll find simple but useful samples
like starting and stopping multiple VMs,
vertically scaling SQL Server databases,
building an Active Directory forest, and more.
Runbooks are powerful tools to automate
a broad range of tasks in Azure.
There are many more automation options across services
and across the life cycle of management,
from deployment and day to day management
to optimizing resources in complex hydration.
Next up, Azure resource manager templates
provide a declarative approach to provisioning resources
and even entire multi-tiered applications
end to end within Azure.
Azure resource manager templates allow you
to define complete topologies with compute,
networking, and any other type of resource you need
for the apps, services, and solutions you build in Azure.
These templates are JSON-based files
that define the required infrastructure,
services, and configurations to be automated.
And you can even provide parameters to customize
the resulting services to your environment.
You can deploy Azure resource manager templates
using the Azure CLI, PowerShell, CloudShell,
the Azure Portal, and many other SDKs or tools for Azure.
You can learn from many existing solutions,
including Quickstart templates and existing solutions
in the public Azure marketplace or via the Azure portal.
These marketplace solutions are provided
by Microsoft and our partners to provide
a first-class experience for deploying
and running production workloads in Azure.
When you provision an application via the Azure marketplace,
you're guided through an easy,
step-by-step process to configure basic settings
and parameters, determining things
like under which subscription the solution will run.
Resource group assignment, deployment regions, sizing,
disk type, network configurations, and integration settings.
These steps are great for provisioning
and building our highly-customized scenarios
using Visual Studio Code or other JSON editors
and from within a resource group
and its underlying resources, you can access
an Azure resource manager template
by selecting automation script in the portal.
You can then use it as a starting point
to customize additional automation via virtual machines,
container, database, and app services,
virtual networks, and more within a resource group.
You can initiate the Azure resource manager template,
for example, using Azure CLI commands,
PowerShell commandlets, .NET, or Ruby.
And for more comprehensive scenarios,
you can also upload artifacts like PowerShell
or Bash scripts that can be called by Azure resource manager
as part of a post-deployment configuration process.
Moving on to serverless options for automation,
Azure Logic Apps is a service that allows you
to run automated, scalable workflows that integrate apps
and data across cloud services and on-premises systems.
With logic apps, you can create, design,
and deploy automation for integration
with both business and IT related processes.
Hundreds of logic app connectors are pre-built
for easy drag and drop style development
with other services, like Azure SQL Database,
Office 365, Salesforce, Google G Suite,
or a broad range of Azure services.
And you can build your own custom connectors,
calling your own code snippets, via Azure Functions,
open API definitions, Postman collections, or from scratch.
Additionally, Azure Functions is
a core serverless compute service
that enables you to run code on demand without having
to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure.
You can call Azure Functions with your code to run a script
or other automation based on a trigger or event.
Azure Functions can be written
in C#, F#, JavaScript, or Java.
And we'll be adding more common scripting languages
and developer platforms over time.
Now it's important to note that in addition
to automation platforms spanning resource types,
there are unique automation options
within individual resources themselves,
like virtual machines, databases,
app services, storage, AI, and IOT.
And there are both customizable and built-in methods
across Azure services to automate processes and tasks.
Starting with virtual machines, there are several
automation options in addition to automation scripts.
A core concept of cloud computing is elastic scale.
And virtual machine scale sets deliver elastic scale
by letting you automatically create
and manage a group of identical low balance VMs.
The number of VM instances can automatically increase
or decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule.
You can also automate simple, common operations
within your virtual machines, like auto-shutdown
of the VM or recurring backups or OS updates.
In data services, there are also automated options
for data discovery and classification.
This can be used for discovering, classifying, labeling,
and protecting the sensitive data in your databases,
and dynamic data masking, where an automated process
can discover credit card, email, or customer number
or string formats, to hide sensitive information from view.
App services automation can use WebJobs,
which run scripts or programs as background processes
in the context of your app,
either continuously or when triggered.
You can also use app service Push to send push notifications
via notifications hubs to trigger events
or report status for an automated process.
Azure queue storage provides asynchronous messaging
between application components,
whether they're running in the cloud, on the desktop
or an on-premises server, or on a mobile device.
Queue storage also supports managing
asynchronous tasks and process workflows,
used for automated processes and procedures.
Automation options also extend
to artificial intelligence workloads,
using batch AI, and internet of things,
using IOT hub to trigger automated workflows.
There's also device provisioning services for zero-touch,
which gives you just-in-time automated provisioning
that can scale to millions of devices.
So that was a run through
of a few core options for automation in Azure.
These are the common services and controls
you can leverage within the Azure Portal.
But since many services can be automated via your code
and scripting, combined with polling and eventing,
there are limitless options where you can use
your tools of choice, along with Azure services.
And of course, you can learn more
about running your apps and workloads on Azure
by following the related topics on Azure essentials.
Thanks for watching!
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