OMS Automation … why do I need it?

Summary: With the incredible scale available via Azure, today’s IT Pros are faced with a management problem that even a couple of years ago seemed unbelievable…

Good morning everyone, Ed Wilson here, and today I want to talk about Azure automation with Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS). So, the other day I was presenting at the Windows PowerShell Saturday event in Tampa Florida and had the chance to talk to over a hundred DevOps kinds of IT people. Most had already moved some stuff to the cloud, or were seriously thinking about and planning such a move. But while it is one thing to manage a few hundred servers on premises using build books, logging, configuration management and the like, such manual processes simply don’t scale. And it was not that many years ago when one IT Pro was responsible for 10 – 15 servers … that number keeps growing and growing and growing, and now some IT Pros manage literally thousands of servers … of course they know how to automate solutions.

So the answer to how do I keep thousands of servers running my services configured correctly is to use Azure Automation. This helps to avoid the complications and error prone manual processes.

So, I have a lot of servers to manage. Ok. But they are in many different roles. Ok. I get that set up. Then we add more servers that need to be configured because the infrastructure scales because I need to meet the demands of my applications.

It helps a little bit because all of the servers in the same role need to be configured exactly the same. Cool.

But then servers that are in different roles need to be configured differently. Ok, I just need to know what those servers are, and how they are supposed to be different.

So I can handle all of that during deployment.

But then things change …

Once servers are deployed, things begin to change. This is because other people have access to the VM’s. It may be other admins, or it may be software developers who deploy applications and change things. It might be the result of someone trying to troubleshoot a problem, and they make changes and don’t change them back.

Or maybe there are software patches that are deployed in some places, but not in others and as the application demands change, the configurations change with them and we need to try to keep the configurations up to date to support the changes.

And people forget to tell one another what is going on. So one admin makes one change, and another admin changes things back.

It is quite common that one team is responsible for one piece of a configuration, and another team is responsible for some other part of a configuration.

All of these are common challenges we face in the modern Dev/Ops world.

That is all I have for you today. We will talk about this in more detail later, and I will show how OMS can help to solve this situation.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter and the Microsoft OMS Facebook site. If you want to learn more about Windows PowerShell, visit the Hey, Scripting Guy Blog. If you have any questions, send email to me at scripter@microsoft.com. I wish you a wonderful day, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Ed Wilson
Microsoft Operations Management Team