Summary

This was a technology-heavy chapter and we covered different technologies that will help in automation of provisioning and managing environments. We started with Azure Resource Manager and its features and concepts. Then, we moved on to Azure Resource Manager templates, described various components of templates and how to author them, constructed a simple minimal template, used tools for authoring templates and then deployed them through PowerShell. Then, we discussed PowerShell as a command-line and scripting language that helps in automation and administration of infrastructure and environment. We also discussed some of its most important concepts like variables, pipelines, cmdlets, scripts, and modules. We covered the PowerShell script unit testing tool, Pester. We tried to understand Pester and its concepts using two examples. Finally, we discussed Desired State Configuration as a configuration platform with its Pull and Push architecture, their process flow, and ways to use configuration files to configure target computer nodes.