Deployment

How to create reusable Infrastructure as Code with Azure Bicep using Modules

Why and how you can create reusable infrastructure as code part 1

Ever since they were released, ARM templates required you to supply the name of the Resource Group you want to deploy to as part the deployment command. This restriction meant that the Resource Group always needed to exist before running your deployment. I mentioned in my article on Terraform that one of the advantages of this is that you can create the resource group as part of your deployment template, no need to create it separately.

If you’ve been to any cloud or devops conference or meetup in the last year, you’ve probably heard about Terraform, the Infrastructure as Code tool from Hashicorp, it’s been one of the big talking points of the devops community for some time now. Terraform is a proprietary language for creating infrastructure as code deployment solutions, and one of it’s biggest selling points is that it supports multiple different cloud vendors including Azure.

Don’t forget to check out the other parts in this series: Part 1 – Version Control Part 2 – Testing Part 3- Build Defining Infrastructure as Code is becoming prevalent in all areas of IT, but none more so than in the cloud. Be this Azure Resource Manager Templates, AWS Cloudformation or third party tools like Terraform. Once you’ve gone down this route, you open up the ability to treat your infrastructure code like any other code, and because it’s just code you can now leverage some of the tools developers have been using for years in their software lifecycle.

Back in June Microsoft introduced the ability to have an ARM template deploy to more than one resource group, at Ignite this year they went a step further to allow cross subscription deployments. It is now possible to have a single deployment create resources in multiple resource groups, regions and subscriptions, which is really useful if you are trying to deploy environments that include separate DR locations, or deployments that impact both a client and a core set of infrastructure.

Virtual Machines in a Scale Set provide a great way to spin up many identical machines in parralell. Thes VMs are all based on a common VM image and so unless all you need on your VMs is Windows, you are going to need to load applicaitons and data into these VMs. Getting your applications into that image can be done one of two ways: Use a Gallery image for your scale set and apply your applications on each VM when it is deployed using something like the PowerShell DSC extension, or Chef/Puppet etc.