Versioning ARM Template deployments

When deploying resources on Azure with Azure Resource Manager you want to be in control of which resources are deployed and control their life span. To get the control you need to do deploy in a tested, standardized and reusable manner. This can be done by managing your resource creation as Infrastructure as Code.

Advertisement

Keep your ARM deployment secrets in the Key Vault

When creating new resource in Azure that have secrets like passwords or ssl certificates you can securely save them in the Key Vault and get them from the Key Vault when you deploy. Only the people who need access to the secrets can read and write them to the Key Vault. In a infrastructure as code scenario the secrets are supplied when deploying your templates to Azure. The code it self will be free of secrets.

Conditional parts in ARM Templates

When creating reusable ARM templates you have a number of options on how to manage conditional parts in your templates. The smallest conditions can be done by parameters, medium differences can be done by  t-shirt sizes and large differences by linked templates. In this blog post I’ll show how to use implement conditions by linked templates.

Access Azure PAAS without internet access

In some Azure environments the organization limits the outbound internet traffic from their servers. There are scenarios where you need to access Azure PAAS services (blob storage, or Azure SQL database etc.). You have to block the access to the internet and enable access to the Azure IP ranges Microsoft reserved for a specific Azure datacenter. To be able to access the service I made a script that will generate the Network Security Groep Rules in ARM format to give access to Azure services.

Visualizing your cloud resources with dot and Terraform

Terraform is able to generate graph files in dot (graph description language) format from your deployment plan. With some tooling the dot files be generated into image files. This makes reviewing and talking about Terraform templates easier. You are able to review a visual graph before deployment.

Getting started with Terraform on Windows and Azure

When reviewing possible for creating declarative infrastructure, I looked at Terraform. In this blog post I show how easy it is to get started and create AzureRM resources with Terraform.