Autopilot doesn’t install software, except in Autopilot Pre-Provisioning scenario, formerly known as ‘white glove’.  Usually that’s handled through Intune. But what if you need more?

With Application Management module, you get:

• A rich, reusable package library
• Centralized packaging support across multiple tenants
• A solution that works beyond Intune, including SCCM, hybrid setups, and disconnected environments

It’s a modern take on application delivery, with better flexibility and fewer limitations.

In response, existing solutions have been around for a long time that still follow the core ideas of infrastructure as code, but with different priorities. Instead of being dependent on state files and extensive tooling, they are often enough to fulfill the needs of modern infrastructure deployments. We are discussing cloud-provider SDKs and command-line interfaces (CLIs).

These tools offer first-class feature access without the Terraform delay. And they give you finer control and custom logic through programmatic control and additional conditional logic, which is sometimes cumbersome or verbose in Terraform.

Often, the approach to implementing small-scale tasks leads to easier maintainability, faster execution, more predictable deployments, and less stress for the teams involved.

Last but not least, it reduces abstraction overhead; native tools do exactly what the API says, no translation or misalignment.

We could still say that with Terraform, you have one language that you have to learn to automate your entire infrastructure deployment on different platforms, but although you are using only one language, you still have to adjust all resource definitions to the cloud-specific parameters. So, why not use platform-specific tools directly from the start?