Concepts related to Azure Automation

You now know that Azure Automation requires an account, which is called an Azure Automation account. Before we dive deeper, let's examine the concepts related to Azure Automation. Understanding the meaning of each of these terms is very important, as we are going to use these terms throughout this chapter. Let's start with runbook.

Runbook

An Azure Automation runbook is a collection of scripting statements representing a single step in process automation or a complete process automation. It is possible to invoke other runbooks from a parent runbook, and these runbooks can be authored in multiple scripting languages. The languages that support authoring runbooks are as follows:

• PowerShell
• Python 2 (at the time of writing)
• PowerShell workflows
• Graphical PowerShell
• Graphical PowerShell workflows

Creating an Automation account is very easy and can be done from the Azure portal. In the All Services blade...