Azure Infrastructure Operations Project: Deploying a scalable IaaS web server in Azure

Introduction

For this project, I was required to write a Packer template and a Terraform template to deploy a customizable, scalable web server in Azure.

Getting Started

1. Clone this repository
2. Create a tagging policy for Azure
3. Create a Packer file to server your image
4. Create your infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform
5. Deploy your IaC using Terraform

Dependencies

1. Create an Azure Account
2. Install the Azure command line interface
3. Install Packer
4. Install Terraform

Instructions

Deploy a Policy

1. Write a policy definition to deny the creation of resources that do not have tags.
2. Export your environment variables for client_id, client_secret, and subscription_id.
3. Apply the policy definition to the subscription with the name "tagging-policy"
4. Use az policy assignment list and to see the out of your policy

Packer Template

1. Use an Ubuntu 18.04-LTS SKU as the base image
2. Ensure the following in your provisions:

"inline": ["echo 'Hello, World!' > index.html",
"nohub busybox httpd -f -p 80 &" ],
"inline_shebang": "/bin/sh -x", "type": "shell"

3. Ensure that the resource group you specify in Packer for the image is the same specified in Terraform
4. Use packer build server.json to deploy the packer image

Terraform Template

In your main.tf configure the following:

1. Create a Resource Group
2. Create a Virtual network and a subnet on that virtual network
3. Create a Network Security Group. Ensure that you explicitly allow access to other VMs on the subnet and deny direct access from the internet
4. Create a Network Interface
5. Create a Public IP.
6. Create a Load Balancer. Your load balancer will need a backend address pool and address pool association for the network interface and the load balancer
7. Create a virtual machine availability set
8. Create virtual machines. Make sure you use the image you deployed using Packer!
9. Create managed disks for your virtual machines
10. Ensure a variables file allows for customers to configure the number of virtual machines and the deployment at a minimum.

You can customize the values without hard-coding them into the main.tf file, by using the vars.tf file.

For example in the vars.tf file you can include:

variable "location" {
    description = "The Azure Regin that all resources in the project should be created"
    default = "eastus"
}

Can be used instead of hard-coding eastus and improves the reusability of the code.

Once finished use terraform plan -out solution.plan to deploy the terraform template and review before you deploy.

After you confirm everything you can use terraform apply to deploy all the resources to Azure.

When you are ready to remove everything you simply use terraform destroy and to verify everything was deleted you can use terraform show.