Automation, Virtualization, and Infrastructure as Code

I recently took a 4 day training course on Azure Administration with the curriculum covering many aspects in the AZ-103 certification.  The specifics of the class can be found here  https://www.globalknowledge.com/us-en/course/178424/microsoft-azure-administrator-az-103/ .  Prior to taking this course I have had zero experience with either Azure, AWS, or cloud infrastructure in general.  I've heard of high-level concepts and done some reading on my own, but no tangible hands-on action with either provider. One thing from that course which is openly available are the lab materials.  I found them to be very helpful for me to get some practical experience working with Azure and understanding some of the main concepts of cloud infrastructure. Prerequisites  In order to run the labs in Azure you will need one of the following: An active subscription to Azure Sign up for the free Azure trial here:   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/...

Since this is my first official blog post, I thought I'd cover a situation that is very recent in my career, and that is automating server/vm deploys.  One of the challenges my team faces is the amount of time it takes to execute a server request into a tangible VM in a timely fashion.  By the time a request gets put in, and it gets escalated to the right team there's a turnaround of up to 5 business days, and that's assuming the request gets executed correctly the first time.  From an end user's perspective, that's an incredibly long time.  It's not flexible, not agile, and not timely.  So I decided to solve that problem.  The whole solution is a bit extensive, so I will break this post up into two parts.  So let's get started with part 1. Requirements Phase 1 of the solution I want to implement has to have a few key characteristics: It has to be repeatable with expected results It has to be easy enough for anyone to execute It has to speed ...