One of the great advantages of using the public cloud is the ability to deploy applications and services at scale. But scale has a flip side, as working with dozens or hundreds of servers imposes new constraints on systems administration. Where we could manage one or two devices using a CLI or a GUI, or 10 or 20 devices using our own scripts, managing a massive fleet of devices requires a very different approach. We need infrastructure as code and automation.
This approach is the basis for Microsoft’s Azure Automation, a collection of tools for managing virtual infrastructures using a mix of declarative deployments and PowerShell-based Desired State Configuration (DSC).
