Azure DSC vs Azure Automation

To automatically turn off windows server instances – Azure Automation

To manage Linux VMs – Chef Cookbooks

Azure Automation Account – Runbooks, Assets and Run As

Automation is for both azure and non azure environments. INCLUDES Azure Automation State Configuration (DSC) compilation as one of it’s options.

 

VM Configuration with roles etc.?

Use DSC. Can also use Chef, Puppet – but these cost money

ARM Templates

Add deployments resource to the main template

“resources”: [ { “type”: “Microsoft.Resources/deployments”, “apiVersion”: “2018-05-01”, “name”: “linkedTemplate”, “properties”: { “mode”: “Incremental”, <nested-template-or-external-template> } } ]

 

References in ARM Templates

For known input – use variables and parameters, but what if it’s something you cannot know before deploy, such as the dynamic IP address of your new VM, or the FQDN of your new public IP address for your service?

References – The answer is to use References to access properties of other resources within your template.

Use Output  = However, if you need to get information between templates then you also need to look at outputs.