Intro

Azure Automation delivers a cloud-based automation and configuration service that supports consistent management across your Azure and non-Azure environments. It comprises process automation, configuration management, update management, shared capabilities, and heterogeneous features.

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Documentation

• Azure Automation Runbooks

• Pricing

• Azure Automation runbook types

• Runbook execution in Azure Automation

• Azure Automation account authentication overview

• Manage an Azure Automation Run As account

• Runbook execution environment

• Creating and publishing an item

• Lots of code examples: Browse code samples

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Tips and Tidbits

• You need to create an automation account first.

  • Automation account names are unique per region and resource group.

  • Names for Automation accounts that have been deleted might not be immediately available.

  • The name can contain only letters, numbers, and hyphens. The name must start with a letter, and it must end with a letter or a number. The account name length must be from 6 to 50 characters

• When you start Azure Automation for the first time, you must create at least one Automation account.

  • Automation accounts allow you to isolate your Automation resources, runbooks, assets, and configurations from the resources of other accounts

• Azure Automation allows you to automate frequent, time-consuming, and error-prone cloud management tasks by using PowerShell, PowerShell Workflow, and graphical runbooks

• Automation executes your runbooks based on the logic defined inside them.

• If a runbook is interrupted, it restarts at the beginning. This behavior requires you to write runbooks that support being restarted if transient issues occur.

• Each job accesses Azure resources by making a connection to your Azure subscription.

• The job can only access resources in your data center if those resources are accessible from the public cloud.

• You can't convert runbooks from graphical to text type, or the other way around

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• Run As accounts in Azure Automation provide authentication for managing resources using Automation runbooks and other Automation features. 

• When you create a Run As account, it performs the following tasks:

  • Creates an Azure AD application with a self-signed certificate, creates a service principal account for the application in Azure AD, and assigns the Contributor role for the account in your current subscription

Where to run runbooks

• Runbooks in Azure Automation can run on either an Azure sandbox or a Hybrid Runbook Worker.

• When runbooks are designed to authenticate and run against resources in Azure, they run in an Azure sandbox, which is a shared environment that multiple jobs can use.

• Jobs using the same sandbox are bound by the resource limitations of the sandbox.

• You can use a Hybrid Runbook Worker to run runbooks directly on the computer that hosts the role and against local resources in the environment. 

• Automation sandboxes support .NET Framework 4.7.2, and upgrading to a different version is not supported.

• The Azure sandbox environment does not support interactive operations.

  • It prevents access to all out-of-process COM servers, and it does not support making WMI calls to the Win32 provider in your runbook. 

• If you need to create temporary files as part of your runbook logic, you can use the Temp folder (that is, $env:TEMP) in the Azure sandbox for runbooks running in Azure. The only limitation is you cannot use more than 1 GB of disk space, which is the quota for each sandbox