Other Solutions
Another big player in the orchestration market is Puppet. Until very recently, the support for Azure in Puppet was very limited, but that is changing very quickly. The Puppet module, puppetlabs/azure_arm
, is still somewhat in its infancy, but puppetlabs/azure
provides you with everything you'll need. Both modules need the Azure CLI to work. The integration of the Azure CLI in their commercial Puppet Enterprise product is amazingly good. Azure has a VM extension that's available for VMs that will become Puppet nodes.
More information can be found at https://puppet.com/products/managed-technology/microsoft-windows-azure.
You can also go for the Chef software, which provides an automation and orchestration platform that has been around for a long time. Its development started in 2009! The user writes "recipes" that describe how Chef manages the "kitchen" using tools such as a knife. In Chef, much of its terminology comes from the kitchen...