Simple setup on how to deploy Custom VMs to Azure via packer

Link to the main Azure Packer docs

To get started from scratch:

• get the az CLI installed
• login to your Azure account: az login
• create a resourceGroup: az group create -n myResourceGroupName -l westeurope
• create azure credentials (packer authenticates to azure via a service principal): az ad sp create-for-rbac --role Contributor --query "{ client_id: appId, client_secret: password, tenant_id: tenant }"
• At this stage you should get the output:

{
    "client_id": "xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx",
    "client_secret": "xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx",
    "tenant_id": "xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx"
}

• To authenticate to Azure, you need to get the subscription ID of the resource group that you want packer to target: az account show --query "{ subscription_id: id }"
• At this stage after filling out the ubuntu.json packer template with your own values, you should be able to run the ubuntu.json packer definition in the infra directory:

packer build infra/ubuntu.json

• This initial build tends to take around 6 - 7 minutes

• Assuming you've started following these steps with a fresh resource group, your azure environment should look like the following:

• You can now create a scale set image which inherits this image.

• Doing the above via the az cli seems to work but when you follow these steps via the Azure UI it seems to output this error for some reason 🤷‍♂️

==> azure-arm: ERROR: -> ResourceNotFound : The Resource 'Microsoft.Compute/images/test' under resource group 'myResourceGroup' was not found. For more details please go to https://aka.ms/ARMResourceNotFoundFix
==> azure-arm:
==> azure-arm: resources.GroupsClient#CheckExistence: Failure responding to request: StatusCode=403 -- Original Error: autorest/azure: error response cannot be parsed: "" error: EOF
Build 'azure-arm' errored after 1 second 51 milliseconds: resources.GroupsClient#CheckExistence: Failure responding to request: StatusCode=403 -- Original Error: autorest/azure: error response cannot be parsed: "" error: EOF

==> Wait completed after 1 second 52 milliseconds

==> Some builds didn't complete successfully and had errors:
--> azure-arm: resources.GroupsClient#CheckExistence: Failure responding to request: StatusCode=403 -- Original Error: autorest/azure: error response cannot be parsed: "" error: EOF