/udacity-2021-azure-infrastructure-operations-project

Primary LanguageHCL

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

Introduction

For this project, you will 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 your infrastructure as code

  3. Update this README to reflect how someone would use your code.

Dependencies

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

Instructions

Packer

  1. server.json contains your Packer VM image configuration

  2. There are a couple of items you might need to modify before running it:

    1. Make sure to export the environment variables listed under section variables. For that you might want to create a .env file and then you can export then in your current terminal session with with the following command export $(cat .env | xargs)

    NOTE: remember not to add the `.env`` file under version control! That might reveal your secrets to 3rd parties.

    1. Depending on your needs you might want to change your VM image configuration under builders. For starters, I would suggest to continue with the default version. You might just want to update the managed_image_resource_group_name and managed_image_name keys as you need.

    NOTE: managed_image_resource_group_name value will need to match your resource group in your main.tf file and managed_image_name will need to match packer_image_name from vars.tf (see below)

  3. Build and deploy your image with the following command: packer build server.json.

Terraform

  1. main.tf and vars.tf contains your Terraform infrastructure configuration

  2. Possible adjustments to the main.tf file:

    1. "azurerm_resource_group - name must match the resource group name you gave in Packer's managed_image_resource_group_name. The main part of the name is imported from the vars.tf file from prefix.

  3. Possible adjustments to the vars.tf file:

    1. prefix - defines the beginning of the name of all resources created for this deployment. Defaults to project-web-server
    2. location - defines the deployment location. Defaults to West Europe
    3. packer_image_name - defines the name of the image. Defaults to packer_image_name
    4. n_update_domains - defines the number of update domains of the VM in the availability set. Depending on your needs, you might want to adjust this number during deployment to increase/ decrease availability. Defaults to 5
    5. admin_username - defines the name to use as the admin account on the VMs that will be part of the VM scale set. Defaults to konradino
    6. admin_password - defines the password for you VMs admin account. There is no default and Terraform will ask you to provide it during the deployment
    7. tags - defines a set of tags attached to created resources. Defaults to project = "udacity-ws"

  4. Create and persist your Terraform plan using the following command: terraform plan -out solution.plan

  5. Deploy your created plan using: terraform apply "solution.plan".

Output

Once your terminal is filled with green notifications saying:

+ "Builds finished"

and

+ "Apply complete! Resources ..."

it means your resources are up and running! :)