Last week, Microsoft announced native support for Powershell in Azure Automation. From the Azure blog –
If you’re familiar with the Azure Automation service, you know it’s a wonderful tool for reliably automating all the manual, long-running, error-prone, and frequently repeated tasks needed to keep your IT infrastructure in the cloud and on-premises up and running. But you’re probably also aware Azure Automation doesn’t actually execute pure PowerShell, it executes PowerShell Workflow.
There are a lot of benefits to PowerShell Workflow. In addition to allowing you to leverage the semantics, modules, knowledge, content, and community around PowerShell, it also gives you access to the power of Windows Workflow Foundation. With Windows Workflow Foundation you have the ability to checkpoint, suspend, and resume your runbooks to better handle logic, environment, or network failures, as well as the ability to easily execute things in parallel or serially.
But, like with most things in life, you don’t get the good without the bad! While PowerShell Workflow is very similar to regular PowerShell, it does have some differences and limitations to allow for some of the additional features it adds. For example, wouldn’t it be nice if we could just take things we’ve already written as PowerShell scripts, or use only our existing PowerShell knowledge, and with just that get up and running in Azure Automation?
Well, today’s your lucky day. Azure Automation now includes another runbook type besides PowerShell Workflow and Graph – PowerShell. PowerShell runbooks have the same lifecycle, capabilities and management as other runbook types, but allows you to run native PowerShell in Azure Automation.
To get started using native PowerShell runbooks in your Automation accounts, just go to the Azure preview portal, select an Automation account, click Runbooks > Add Runbook, then either create a new PowerShell runbook or import an existing PowerShell script.
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