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Azure Automation is targeted at the repetitive enterprise-level tasks, from simple to complex, that you perform regularly. Any error-prone operation that takes a long time to complete and is going to be done two or more times in its lifetime is a good candidate for Azure Automation. Its overall focus is to provide management of the previously mentioned Azure services.

Let’s look at some reasons Azure Automation might interest you from a business and technical standpoint.


Windows PowerShell workflow
You can leverage your current expertise and investment in Windows PowerShell. Azure Automation is based on Windows PowerShell, but it’s implemented via Windows PowerShell workflows. A workflow is a group of individual steps that performs a defined task. The workflow follows the model of orchestration set forth by System Center Orchestrator. It gives a flexible orchestration process for workflows and improves reliability across tools, systems, and departments in your organization with a scripting element.

You can integrate Azure Automation into existing systems and existing Windows PowerShell workflow modules to enable integration into other systems via automated repeatability. Azure Automation’s engine is the same one used by Service Management Automation (SMA) and is built on the PowerShell Workflow engine. You can take Windows PowerShell workflows you have today and, with a few modifications to adjust to the Windows PowerShell workflow model, run them in the Azure Automation portal. IT operations staff don’t need to completely learn a new scripting language.

The Windows PowerShell workflow model increases the reliability of the workflows with their checkpoint model. If for some reason a workflow is interrupted or fails due to a transient error, when it resumes, it does not start at the very beginning of the workflow. Rather, the workflow starts again at the last successful checkpoint in the workflow. This model also provides other improvements in connection pooling and throttling, workflow throttling, and parallel execution of tasks.


End-to-end automation service
With Azure Automation, you can automate end-to-end processes. For instance, if you have a set of Dev/Test VMs, virtual networks, or storage that is no longer needed when testing is done, or you have cloud services that are sitting idle for long periods of time, you can attach metrics and notifications to these processes. Then, you can notify appropriate personnel or release resources when the resources are no longer needed. You can also set up a schedule to automate shutting down resources during certain hours. For a production environment, you might want to manage updates or backups in a way that reduces downtime. Provisioning and updates are easy to manage via automation when you deploy Azure Cloud Services or Azure Virtual Machines and configure the rest of the supporting resources, or enable monitoring for the newly deployed services.

For Azure IT operations personnel, it’s a lot of work to spin up an environment and manage it manually from end to end. If deployment is going to be done two or more times, it makes sense to script deployment using Azure Automation. By automating as much work as possible, IT operations staff are free to do other work while the workflows are working in the background in a consistent and repeatable manner.


Off-premises redundancy backed storage
It’s often useful to have workflows available to an administrator anywhere in the world. Azure Automation gets workflows outside of on-premises computers and into a safe and highly available central repository where they’re available as long as you have an Internet connection. Because they’re stored in Azure locally redundant storage, three copies of the workflows within the same datacenter are backed up automatically. Azure Automation gives you an end-to-end solution so you can manage everything (deployment, maintenance, monitoring, and deprovisioning) about your workflows in a centrally and globally accessible location.


Runbook authoring and importing
Think of a runbook as a physical entity to house Windows PowerShell scripts to run within Azure. Azure Automation provides an environment via a built-in browser control to allow you to author and modify runbooks right in the Azure Management Portal (manage.windowsazure.com). You can create a runbook, import a runbook and run it as is, or you can import a runbook and modify it to fit your needs.


Scenarios
Scenarios in which you could use Azure Automation in your cloud environment include the following:

- Disaster recovery Deploy quickly new instances of Azure resources within an alternative Azure datacenter after a disaster occurs. Resources might include Azure VMs, virtual networks, or cloud services, along with database servers. This approach would be part of a less expensive ―cold‖ disaster recovery strategy where you don’t have a very high recovery time objective (RTO) and don’t need to keep an active version of your deployment up and running.

- High availability Manage service-level agreements (SLAs) related to high availability to ensure that you have the proper level of availability and personnel are notified so that they can take the appropriate steps when resources fail within a datacenter.

- Provisioning Perform initial and subsequent provisioning of a complete deployment, for example, a virtual network, where you assign VMs to it, create cloud services, and join the services to the same virtual network. Anything that you can provision with the Azure Management Portal can be done via Azure Automation.

- Monitoring Establish ways to monitor various attributes of your deployment and take appropriate actions when monitored values reach certain threshold limits.

- Deploying patches Patch remediation is especially important in the IaaS world because you’re responsible for managing the platform and deciding when and how to update the VMs. Azure Automation allows you to develop a runbook to manage the updates at scheduled times to manage patch remediation.

- Managing VMs Azure Automation can help manage the life cycle of your VMs. For instance, you might want to provision VMs, or shut down VMs at a specific time each day. You might want an additional way to scale down unused VMs and not rely on the criteria used by autoscaling criteria (CPU or queue length). After a VM is shut down, you might want to delete its accompanying virtual hard drive (VHD) files that back them up, or store them off to Azure Blob storage for later use if needed.

- Running backups Azure Automation is great for running regular backups of nondatabase systems, such as backing up Blob storage at certain intervals. Using the credential and connection assets of Azure Automation, you can do backups to external systems or servers.


Azure Automation pricing
Azure Automation provides both a Free and a Standard offering. As of this writing, Azure Automation accounts are located in the Eastern U.S., Southeast Asia, and West Europe regions.

The amount of time your jobs run (CPU time) in the system differs between the offerings. For the Free offering, you have up to 500 minutes of CPU time. For Standard, you have up to 10,000 minutes of CPU time available at $20 per month.

This is a great price for all the features that help you better manage your Azure Automation demands by storing, authoring, editing, running, testing, and deploying your automation workflows in the Azure Management Portal conveniently in one place.

Source of Information : Azure Automation