Summary

We started this chapter with a short introduction to orchestration, the reasons to use orchestration, and the different approaches: imperative versus declarative.

After that, we covered the Ansible, Terraform, and PowerShell DSC platforms. Many details were covered about the following:

• How to install the platforms
• Working with resources at the OS level
• Integration with Azure

Ansible is by far the most complete solution, and maybe the one with the least steep learning curve. However, all of the solutions are very powerful and there are always ways around their limitations. And for all orchestration platforms, the future is promising in terms of even more features and capabilities.

Creating Linux VMs is not the only way to create a workload in Azure; you can also use container virtualization to deploy a platform for your application. In the next chapter, we're going to cover container technologies.