On the 2nd of May 2023, Jaspreet Kaur of the Azure Automation Product Group released this blog, providing an update on updates to Azure Automation in 2022 and what is in the pipeline for 2023.
In the blog, Jaspreet detailed the major changes that Microsoft have made to the core of Azure Automation to improve the reliability and scalability of the underlying infrastructure. There has been an emphasis on the move away from the Drawbridge (SQLPAL) sandboxing technology for job execution isolation over to Azure Container Instances (ACI) platform, this is significantly more secure and provides Hyper-V isolation.
This shift will enhance the overall system stability and scalability, in addition to the executing security of Azure Automation.
Microsoft has also invested heavily to advance the resiliency options for Azure Automation within regional availability zones. This improves fault-tolerant to zone failures within a given Azure data center. This will significantly improve the service stability for customers with Data sovereignty concerns that restrict their use of global failover resiliency.
The increased security focus has resulted in the retirement of several Azure Automation components replaced with new and more secure replacements. These are;
Retiring Feature | Retirement Date | Feature Replacement |
| Run As Accounts | 30 September 2023 | Managed Identity (Announcement blog here) |
| Desired state configuration VM extension for Linux | 30 September 2023 | Extension-based User Hybrid Runbook Worker (Announcement blog here) |
| Agent-based User Hybrid Runbook Worker | 31 August 2024 | Azure Automanage Machine configuration (Announcement blog here) |
For 2023 the focus of the Azure Automation Product Group will be around;
- General Availability release of PowerShell 7.2 and Python 3.10 support
- Further platform modernization to improve reliability, scale and security hardening.
For further details, read the complete blog at: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-governance-and-management/azure-automation-a-comprehensive-recap-of-2022-and-what-s-coming/ba-p/3810885
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