Automation

Automation is needed for the provisioning, operations, management, and deprovisioning of IT resources within an organization. Figure 4.1 gives you a closer look at what each of these use cases represents:

Figure 4.1: Use cases of automation

Before the advent of the cloud, IT resources were primarily on-premises, and manual processes were often used for these activities. However, since cloud adoption has increased, automation has found increased focus and attention. The primary reason is that cloud technology's agility and flexibility provide an opportunity to provision, deprovision, and manage these resources on the fly in a tiny fraction of the time it used to take. Along with this flexibility and agility come the requirements to be more predictable and consistent with the cloud because it has become easy for organizations to create resources.

Microsoft has a great tool for IT automation known as System Center Orchestrator. It is a great tool for automation for on-premises and cloud environments, but it is a product and not a service. It should be licensed and deployed on servers, and then runbooks can be executed to effect changes on cloud and on-premises environments.

Microsoft realized that an automation solution was required that could be provided to customers as a service rather than bought and deployed as a product. Enter Azure Automation.