Automating Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services

Chapter 1. Introduction

The Microsoft Azure PowerShell cmdlets are one of the primary tools in use today for automating Microsoft Azure from the Windows platform. The cmdlets take the native automation capabilities of PowerShell and add in the ability to provision compute and other services on the fly in Microsoft Azure. This mix of technical capabilities has truly opened the doors to cloud automation in Microsoft Azure, providing the ability to deploy solutions that are both complex and at scale.

Why Use the Microsoft Azure PowerShell Cmdlets?

Prior to the dawn of cloud computing, deploying a new application was a fairly involved task. First, you had to order servers, wait for them to ship, unpack them from their boxes, set up the network, install an operating system, patch the operating system, and finally install software and configure your application. I am purposely glossing over the “organizational agility” needed to accomplish this if you were responsible for the application but another group was responsible for the infrastructure.

Thanks to cloud providers such as Microsoft and Amazon, you as the lucky individual living in the cloud-computing era can now skip many of these steps and focus on managing your application or infrastructure at a much higher level. The cloud removes the responsibility from you to manage hardware resources directly. Now it can be as easy as clicking through a web page-based wizard to provision numerous virtual machines and then logging in to deploy ...