IAC – Using Azure RM templates

As cloud Software development heavily leverages virtualized systems and developers have started using Continuous Integration (CI), many things have started to change. The number of environment developers have to deal with has gone up significantly. Developers now release much frequently, in many cases, multiple times in a single day. All these releases has to be tested, validated. This brings up a new requirement to spin up an environment fast, which is identical to production.

The need for an automated way of provisioning such environments fast (in a repeatable manner) become obvious and hence IAC (stands for Infrastructure as Code) kicked in.

There are numerous tools (Puppet, Ansible, Vagrant etc.) that help building such coded-environment. Azure Resource Manager Template brings a new way of doing IAC when an application is targeted to build and run on Azure. Most of these tools (including RM template) are even idempotent, which ensures that you can run the same configuration multiple times while achieving the same result.

From Microsoft Azure web site:

Azure applications typically require a combination of resources (such as a database server, database, or website) to meet the desired goals. Rather than deploying and managing each resource separately, you can create an Azure Resource Manager template that deploys and provisions all of the resources for your application in a single, coordinated operation. In the template, you define the resources that are needed for the application and specify deployment parameters to input values for different environments. The template consists of JSON and expressions which you can use to construct values for your deployment.

I was excited the first time I saw this in action in one of the Channel9 Videos. Couldn’t wait to give it a go. The idea of having a template that describes all the Azure resources (Service Bus, SQL Azure, VMs, WebApps etc.) in a template file and having the capability to parameterized it with different values that varies over different environments could be very handy for a CI/CD scenarios. The templates can be nested, which also makes them more modularized and more manageable.

Lately I had the pleasure to dig deeper in Azure RM templates, as we are using it for the project I am working these days. I wanted to come up with a sample template that shows how to use RM template to construct resources that allows me to share my learnings. The Scripts can be found into this GitHub Repo.

One problem that I didn’t know how to handle yet, was the credentials that needed in order to provision the infrastructures. For instance, the VM passwords, SQL passwords etc. I don’t think anybody wants to check-in their passwords, into the source control systems visible in Azure RM parameter JSON files. To address this issue, the solution I came up with for now is, I uploaded the RM parameter JSON files into a private container of a Blob Storage (Note that, the storage account is into the same Azure Subscription where the Infrastructure I intend to provision in). A PowerShell script then download the Shared Access Signature (SAS) token for that Blob storage container and uses that to download the parameters JSON Blob into a PSCustomObject and removes the locally downloaded JSON file. Next step, it converts the PSCustomObject into a Hash Table which is passed through the Azure RM Cmdlet to kick of the provision process. That way, there is no need to have a file checked in to the Source control system that has credentials. Also the Administrators who manages the Azure subscription can Crete a private Blob storage and use the Azure Storage Explorer to create and update his credentials into the RM parameters JSON file. A CI process can download the parameters files just in time before provisioning infrastructures.