I started this chapter with a little introduction to orchestration, why you want to use orchestration, and the different approaches: imperative versus declarative.
After that I covered Ansible, Salt, and PowerShell DSC platforms. Many details were covered about the following:
- How to install the platform
- Working with resources at the OS level
- Integration with Azure
Ansible is by far the most complete solution, and maybe the one with the lowest learning curve. However, all of the solutions are very powerful and there are always ways around the limitations. And for all orchestration platforms, the future is promising in terms of even more features and capabilities.
Creating Linux virtual machines is not the only way to create a workload in Azure; you can also use container virtualization to deploy a platform for your application. In the next chapter, we're going to...