Microsoft Azure Essentials from Microsoft Press is a series of free ebooks designed to help you advance your technical skills with Microsoft Azure.

The second ebook in the series, Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Automation, introduces a fairly new feature of Microsoft Azure called Azure Automation. Using a highly scalable workflow execution environment, Azure Automation allows you to orchestrate frequent deployment and life cycle management tasks using runbooks based on Windows PowerShell Workflow functionality. These runbooks are stored in and backed up by Azure. By automating runbooks, you can greatly minimize the occurrence of errors when carrying out repeated tasks and process automation.

Watch Microsoft Press’s blog and Twitter (@MicrosoftPress) to learn about other free ebooks in the Microsoft Azure Essentials series.