Microsoft recently released a new Azure Automation service, which enable you to automate all your management processes, take advantage of runbooks in the community gallery, and attain reliable execution in the face of failures using checkpoints.
With the help of Azure automation, you cannot execute PowerShell script but will be able to execute PowerShell Workflow. The workflow enables you to leverage the semantics, modules, knowledge, content, and community around PowerShell in addition to giving you access to Windows Workflow Foundation.
Microsoft Azure Automation Script Converter enables you to convert the PowerShell script to PowerShell Workflow so that it will be able to run with little to no manual changes as an Azure Automation runbook. This feature helps you to leverage the vast amount of content around PowerShell script.
Joe Levy, Program Manager, Azure Automation has posted a detailed overview of a scenario where he wrote a little script to stop all his small-sized Azure VMs along with its implications.
The runbook gallery has been updated with support for PowerShell scripts. The Azure ScriptCenter contains many communities and Microsoft contributed PowerShell scripts, not designed for use in Azure Automation, but still meant to help with managing Azure.
However, the runbook gallery will be able to display these PowerShell scripts and convert them using the script converter to PowerShell Workflow so that they will be able to run as runbooks when you import them.
“I know you’re probably very excited to start using the Azure Automation script converter, but I do want to call out a best practice – if you are going to write your runbooks in the PowerShell ISE, test them there, and then import them into Azure Automation for final testing and production operation, learning PowerShell Workflow and authoring runbooks as PowerShell Workflow is the best method,” mentions Joe Levy in his blog post.
Joe further states that it is not completely possible to convert scripts using Azure Automation script converter that will run without fault in PowerShell Workflow. However, an attempt will be made to convert PowerShell script to PowerShell Workflow.
