Summary
As we’ve seen in this chapter, extensions for Azure Virtual Machines can be used to automate a selection of management activities and operations (e.g., backups or monitoring) and to help initialize a machine with additional services and applications. One of the most useful extensions is the Custom Script Extension, which allows you to run any logic contained within a script you provide. It’s a powerful feature, though do note that it’s not meant for setting up configuration at a large scale.
Remember that extensions in Azure Virtual Machines can be used for a wide variety of use cases, starting with installing monitoring agents or Configuration-as-Code agents (such as Puppet). What’s more, they’re generally pretty straightforward features to set up, meaning that you don’t need to provision additional infrastructure to get them working.
In the next chapter, we’ll focus on configuring and using backups for virtual machines...
