Exploring automation tools
There's a whole world to discover when it comes to cloud automation; there are a lot of tools available on the market. The cloud platforms themselves offer native tooling. We'll look at these first.
Azure Automation
Azure Automation offers a variety of solutions to automate repetitive tasks in infrastructure that is deployed in Azure. Using DSC can help in keeping the infrastructure up to standard, consistent, and compliant. It may be good to recap DSC first since it's an important aspect of cloud automation.
We're automating for two main reasons: to drive operational costs down and to prevent human error by having administrators doing too many manual and repetitive tasks. DSC is one way to start with automation. If we run a server farm, we might get to a point where we discover that over time, the settings on these servers have changed and actually differ from each other. If there's a good reason to allow these differences...