Every organization wants to reduce manual effort and error in their pursuits, and automation plays an important role in bringing about predictability, standardization, and consistency in both building a product and in operations. Automation has been the focus of almost every Chief information officer (CIO) and digital officer to ensure that their systems are highly available, scalable, reliable, and able to cater to the needs of their customers.
Automation became more prominent with the advent of the cloud because new resources can be provisioned on the fly without the procurement of hardware resources. Hence, cloud companies want automation in almost all of their activities to reduce misuse, errors, governance, maintenance, and administration.
In this chapter, we will evaluate Azure Automation as a major service that provides automation capabilities, along with its differentiating capabilities compared to other apparently similar-looking services. This chapter will cover the following:
The Azure Automation landscape
The Azure Automation service
Resources for Azure Automation services
Writing Azure Automation runbooks
Webhooks
Hybrid Workers
Let's get started with Azure Automation, a cloud service for process automation.