Understanding Azure Provisioning

I'm producing a series of blog post that highlights the work I've done with an O'Reilly media video course. I will produce several posts a week to support this course, as seen below.

https://bit.ly/bruno-does-linux-data-java

The course is targeted towards developers who want to write Java applications on Linux and host those application in Azure.

These applications talk to today's top data stores, including:

• Azure Tables
• Azure Blobs
• Azure Queues
• SQL Server
• SQL Database
• MySQL
• PostGres
• DocumentDB
• MongoDB
• Cassandra
• Redis

How you can provision compute, networking, and storage in Azure

• The preferred way is through ARM - the declarative way
  • JSON-based text files let's you provision infrastructure
• The imperative way is through scripting - doesn't scale as well
  • Some customers take the approach to generate an ARM template with code as an effort to abstract away the complexities of the ARM templates

Slide 1 of 11 - Provisioning infrastructure

Compute, networking, and storage are bundled up into a resource group

• Typically, resource groups contain resources related to a specific application
  • For example, you might bundle a SQL Server database, a web application, and the storage account in one resource group
• If you delete a resource group, you delete all the resources in that resource group
• Resource groups encapsulate the lifecycle of the resources inside of it
• When you provision resources with the Azure resource manager,, you always provision in the context of specific resource group
  • Resources can be linked across resource groups

2lide 2 of 11 - Resource groups are containers

The Azure portal is also organized through resource groups

• The image to the right shows the "javavm" resource group
• You can see that it has a virtual machine, a network card, and a public IP address

Slide 2 of 11 - Resource groups are part of the Azure portal

Connecting to a VM

• Regardless of whether you have a Linux or Windows virtual machine, you can remote into it
• Putty is one of the approaches you can take with Windows to SSH into a Linux virtual machine
• Simply provide the IP address ( public IP address ) of your virtual machines remote into
  • The default is port 22 for SSH, but that can be modified
  • You can use network security groups to open and close specific ports in a virtual machine

Slide 3 of 11 - several options connecting to virtual machines (Linux or Windows)

Mac or Windows Support

• Mac OS comes in with the built-in ability for SSH
• For Windows you can download Putty

Slide 4 of 11 - Mac or Windows support

Code or JSON

• As explained previously, you can either use code or the declarative syntax using JSON with the Azure resource manager templates
  • The three main sections for templates are:
    • parameters
    • variables
    • resources

Slide 5 of 11 - The declarative JSON approach is preferred

Better to define the end results, then all the steps

• The Azure resource manager lets you define the end state
  • It's a way of expressing to Azure what you want the final outcome to look like

Slide 6 of 11 - Defining the end state

Your deployment consists of two files: parameters file in the template file

• This is demonstrated in detail in the video here: https://bit.ly/bruno-does-linux-data-java

Slide 7 of 11 - It's about the parameters file in the template file

The goals of the Azure resource manager

• You can read more here:
  • https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-overview/
  • https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn790568.aspx
  • https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/powershell-azure-resource-manager/
  • https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-authoring-templates/
  • https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates will

Slide 8 of 11 - Some simple goals

Infrastructure lives in resource groups and resource groups get deployed to a data center

• Resource groups do not span data centers

Slide 9 of 11 - Deployments end up in a data center

Azure XPlat CLI

• Notice the azure group create command
• You specify the resource group, the region, the deployment name
• More importantly, you pass in the deployment file in the parameters file

Slide 10 of 11 - Azure XPlat CLI

Your deployment ends up in the data center

• There are many global data centers to choose from
• This list is constantly growing and may already be out of date
• You can get an updated list here, https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/

Slide 11 of 11 - Choosing from one of many global data centers