Welcome to Week 2

Welcome to Week 2!

Let’s reflect and recap on Week 1, and discuss the expectations of this week.

In Week 1, we explored DevOps and the value it brings to organisations, we discovered Infrastructure as Code and its value proposition, and we covered Azure Automation. We looked at runbooks and distinguished between the different types of runbooks available, the assets and the benefits it has to offer, and basic troubleshooting when your runbooks fail.

This week, we will understand the importance of Desired State Configuration (DSC) in DevOps and how to implement Automation DSC.

By the end of the week, you should be able to:

• Explain the relationship between Windows PowerShell scripting and Desired State Configuration (DSC), and how DSC benefits DevOps culture.
• Implement Azure Automation DSC to manage, deploy, and enforce configurations for virtual machines (VMs).
• Manage the configuration of your cloud and on-premises machines with hybrid management.
• Explain Azure Resource Manager, the second implementation of Azure, and how it allows you to manage resources in a subscription.
• Apply tags in Azure Resource Manager.
• Control access and lock resources in Azure Resource Manager.
• Deploy Azure Resource Manager templates with the portal, CLI, PowerShell, and REST API.
• Visualise your Azure Resource Manager resources and edit them with the Azure Resource Manager template visualiser tool.
• Create and deploy Azure Resource Manager templates in Visual Studio.
• Use the Azure resource group deployment task to use Azure Resource Manager templates from Visual Studio.
• Troubleshoot Azure deployments with activity logs and error codes, and by using Azure Diagnostics.
• Provision and configure environments in Azure with Azure DevTest Labs.