Paul K space : Azure Automation: automation by first principles

First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility. Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” the idea is to break down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble them from the ground up. It’s one of the best ways to learn to think for yourself, unlock your creative potential, and move from linear to non-linear results.

By, taking something you see and trying to replicate that behavior you can create a deep understanding.

If you learn not how something works - but how to break it down to discover how it works, you start to see complex systems and processes as discrete elements - that talk to each other - or do some task

Here we will

• use the Portal to see what each stage of our provisioning looks like - what options are there - what steps does the process take
• while we see each stage in the portal we find the corresponding az cli commands - moving us from a visual workflow to a list of commands with parameters
• understanding the method via az cli is like pseudo code - explicit commands with a limited set of options
• we have a general idea of the steps - so now we can start looking at how that would look in say terraform - or another language
• we can run the steps via cli - so we know it works
• we know what to expect when we progress
• as we progress, we will normally see more and more of the platform features become available - as you get closer to the backend, a facility to use that feature is more likely to have been developed