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Look, Azure Automation sounds complicated. Enterprise-level. Something you need a team for. That's nonsense. You can set this up yourself, running processes that save hours of manual work every single week. No team required. No corporate budget. Just you, understanding what matters.

Here's what Azure Automation actually is.

It's a service that runs tasks for you in the cloud. Automatically. Scripts that start and stop virtual machines. Workflows that back up databases. Processes that clean up resources, send notifications,and update configurations. Work that needs to happen regularly, but doesn't need you sitting there clicking buttons.

Why This Matters Now

Cloud infrastructure costs money every minute it runs. Leave a development VM running over the weekend? That's wasted budget. Forget to scale down after a demo? Unnecessary expense. Miss a backup window? Potential disaster.

Azure Automation fixes this. Not through vigilance — you'll forget eventually. Through systematic, reliable automation that handles the repetitive operational work whilst you focus on building actual value.

Getting Started: The Fundamentals

Azure Automation works through runbooks — scripts that execute in the cloud. PowerShell primarily, though Python is supported. If you can write a script locally, you can automate it in Azure.

Start simple. Pick one repetitive task. Maybe it's starting your development environment each morning. Maybe it's generating a weekly report. One task. Automate it properly. Then move to the next.

The setup is straightforward. Create an Automation Account in your Azure subscription. Inside it, you'll create runbooks, define schedules, and manage credentials securely. Everything is centralised, and everything is version-controlled if you connect it to source control.

Real Use Cases That Matter

Resource Management: Schedule VMs to start before work hours, stop after. Instantly save 60% of compute costs for development environments. Scale down app services during low-traffic periods. Automatically.

Backup and Disaster Recovery: Run backup scripts on schedule. Verify backups actually completed. Alert if they didn't. Copy critical data to secondary regions. Sleep better knowing your data is protected by systems, not memory.

Security and Compliance: Audit configurations regularly. Check for non-compliant resources. Remediate automatically when safe. Security isn't a one-time configuration. It's continuous monitoring. Automation makes that sustainable.

Optimisation: Making It Actually Work

The first version of your runbook will be inefficient. That's expected. Get it working first. Optimise second.

Parallel execution matters for performance. If you're stopping twenty VMs, don't do it sequentially. Do it in parallel. Twenty VMs that took ten minutes now take thirty seconds.

Error handling matters more than you think. What happens when a script fails halfway through? Does it clean up? Does it alert you? Does it retry intelligently? Robust runbooks handle failures gracefully.

Logging is essential. When something goes wrong at 3 AM, detailed logs mean the difference between quick diagnosis and hours of investigation.

Cost Management

Azure Automation pricing is straightforward. You pay per minute of job runtime. Five hundred free minutes monthly. After that, minimal per-minute charges. For most scenarios, we're talking single-digit pounds per month.

But here's the economics that matter — if automation saves you ten hours monthly at a fifty-pound hourly rate, that's five hundred pounds saved. Even if it costs ten pounds to run. The ROI is obvious.

Getting Started Today

Pick one task you do manually every week. Something repetitive. Something you've thought, "there must be a better way" about. That's your first runbook.

Write the script locally first. Test it. Make sure it works. Then migrate it to Azure Automation. Add scheduling. Add error handling. Add logging. Deploy it. Monitor it for a week. Adjust as needed.

Then pick the next task. Repeat. Within a month, you'll have a collection of runbooks handling operational tasks automatically. Time freed up. Costs reduced. Reliability improved.

Here's What Matters

Azure Automation isn't complicated. It's powerful, yes. But accessible. You don't need enterprise experience. You need a willingness to learn and iterate.

Start small. Build incrementally. Focus on automation that delivers clear value — time saved, costs reduced, reliability improved. Avoid automation for automation's sake.

The infrastructure will run itself. If you let it.

Stop managing manually what can be automated systematically. Your time is worth more than that.

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