I was hoping to ask someone what the difference between using Azure Blueprints and Azure Automation is, it looks like I want blueprints (multiple enviroments and clients deploying parameterised ARM templates), but what am I missing about the advantages/features of Azure Automation? Is there a good article for this that I've missed?
I assume (dangerously) from what I've read that I can do more management focused tasks in Automation, while blueprints is for the resource creation/destruction. What I'm struggling with is when to use automate. I can see mostly only needing Blueprints for our needs, except when performing maintenance tasks across multiple environments whereby a well crafted powershell script (workbook?) can be run against all the environments.
We are planning to move over to supporting Azure Lighthouse for managing clients resources, but from what I've read that won't make much difference as long as we have our parameters / tenants / management-groups well managed, because both Blueprints and Automation appeared to support these methods of managing 3rd party resources. Just thought I'd mention it in case it influenced anyone's advice.
Currently our code is in Azure Devops, but we may transition to supporting github/gitlab too (webhook on push/merge) as the clients have the ability to fork and modify custom modules that we will automatically test and deploy, and some organisations may also use other source control providers as long as they support webhooks and common file protocols.