Overview

Test the tooling and processes my team is using to deploy application in an OpenStack region to Azure. This test will bake, test, deploy and form a Consul cluster in Azure.

Dependencies

• Packer
• Ansible
• Terraform

Requirements

An Azure subscription.

How to Build a Consul Cluster in Azure

1. Set Azure Config Mode to ARM

azure config mode arm

2. Login to Your Azure subscription

azure login

NOTE: If you have multiple subscription/account, make sure you are working on the correct subscription by running the following;

azure account list
azure account set <AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION>

3. Create a Service Principal

3a. Create an application

azure ad app create --name "azurefest" --home-page "http://azurefest.demo.net" --identifier-uris "http://azurefest.demo.net" --password <password>

The home-page and identifier-uris are required but you can assign any non-existent url.

3b. Create service principal for the application that you created above using its ApplicationId (AppId above)

azure ad sp create <AppId>

get the comes from the previous step (3a)

3c. Create role assignment for the service principal (SP)

azure role assignment create --objectId <ObjectId> -o Owner -c /subscriptions/<AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION>

get the from the previous step (3b)

4. Assign and export the Azure environment variables.

export ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID=<your_ARM_subscription_id>
export ARM_CLIENT_SECRET=<password>
export ARM_TENANT_ID=<your_ARM_tenant_ID>
export ARM_CLIENT_ID=<your_ARM_client_ID>

5. Run terraform pre-tasks to create needed Azure resources

cd infra/terraform/pre-tasks
terraform plan
teraraform apply

6. Export the resource group and storage account created by terraform's pre-tasks

export ARM_RESOURCE_GROUP=azurefest-sed-rg
export ARM_STORAGE_ACCOUNT=azurefestpersistentsa

7. Fetch the ansible roles and start baking image

cd ../../consul
ansible-galaxy install --role-file=ansible/requirements.yml --roles-path=ansible/roles --force
cd packer
packer build packer.json

Take note of the image id/name created by packer, example: consul-osDisk.ee6c4f8c-27ad-415e-b915-f3fa9df5c9b2.vhd

8. Create/Update main terraform config

Create/Update the main terraform.tf with the image id/name of the baked image and other Azure resource information created from the terraform pre-tasks. One of the Consul public IP address creted from the pre-tasks is needed by terraform to remotely run consul join command.

9. Run terraform plan and apply

cd ../../terraform/
terraform plan
terraform apply

10. Consul cluster should be created

ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa [email protected] '/opt/consul/bin/consul members'

The IP address 13.92.36.55 is from the terraform pre-tasks.

NOTE:
Delete the Azure resource group named azurefest-sed-rg before running this exercise.
Changing the image id/name will not rebuild the nodes, you have to taint the nodes manually to rebuild them.

Azure important urls;

https://resources.azure.com/
http://storageexplorer.com/

Author

Roel Brutas
[email protected]