Designing an Operations Automation Strategy

Automating steps in Azure is a great solution to ensure consistency in your deployments and save time. It reduces errors when applications need to be deployed between different environments in a Development, Testing, Acceptance, and Production (DTAP) architecture. It also saves a lot of time when resources need to be deployed repeatedly, such as multiple development VMs for a team of developers.

Azure offers different solutions and methods in order to design a successful automation strategy, which are described in the following sections. 

Azure PowerShell

Azure PowerShell can be used to create Azure resources, manage and configure your resources, and for automation as well.

Azure PowerShell is used for several examples throughout this book to automate different tasks, such as creating virtual machines and creating network interfaces. It can be used from your local machine, as well as from Azure Cloud Shell. You can use PowerShell for almost everything...