These playbooks are designed to spin up isolated "lab" environments in Azure, handy for dev playground or student environments.
If we have a look at the inventory file, each group will set up a resource group in Azure that has it's own vnet, subnet, and security group. VM's in that group will be created in the resouce group. A public IP will be created for each VM to allow ssh access.
[lab1]
lab1-vm01
lab1-vm02
[lab2]
lab2-vm01
lab2-vm02
[lab1:vars]
lab_name=lab1
[lab2:vars]
lab_name=lab2
Having a look at the Ansible Role structure the defaults/main.yaml defines the variables we will be using. Update the variables for naming, subnet, vm size, etc. as needed.
In the files/ directory we have our public and private key for ssh to the Azure VMs. The public key will be pushed to the VM when Ansible creates it. The private key is encrypted in Ansible Vault. You'll want to delete these keys, generate another pair, ssh-keygen, and encrypt the private key ansible-vault encypt roles/azure-lab/files/id_rsa. Encryption is done so you don't have open private keys in your git repo. When you want to ssh to the VM you can decrypt the key and ssh.
├── azure-lab.yaml
├── inventory
├── readme.md
└── roles
└── azure-lab
├── defaults
│ └── main.yaml
├── files
│ ├── id_rsa
│ └── id_rsa.pub
└── tasks
├── create-infra.yaml
├── create-vm.yaml
├── destroy-lab.yaml
├── destroy-vm.yaml
├── main.yaml
├── shutdown-vm.yaml
└── start-vm.yaml
The /tasks folder contains the playbooks to run, we toggle what playbook is running by setting the activity variable:
ansible-playbook -i inventory azure-lab.yaml -e "activity=create-infra"
ansible-playbook -i inventory azure-lab.yaml -e "activity=create-vm"
ansible-playbook -i inventory azure-lab.yaml -e "destroy-lab"
This will go over using the ansible-playbook command with these .yaml files. Once this is running from the command line you can set up the playbooks in Tower.
To set up in Tower you'll need to create the project (point to repo with this code), the inventory (sourced from the project), azure credentials (using your SP account in Azure AD), and job template (pointing at the azure-lab.yaml in the project).
Make sure you have ansible installed on whatever OS you are using. You'll also want to have Azure cli installed and Azure SDK for python to run the Azure modules.
- Azure CLI install:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cli?view=azure-cli-latest
- SDK Install for Azure modules in playbooks
sudo pip install ansible[azure]
Authenticate to Azure before running playbooks, this can be done with az login and then set your subscription in Azure with az account set --subscription ca7XXXXX
Finally run the playbooks!
ansible-playbook -i inventory azure-lab.yaml -e "activity=create-infra"
ansible-playbook -i inventory azure-lab.yaml -e "activity=create-vm"
When the the create-infra activity is done you'll get output about the public IP.
TASK [azure-lab : Print public IP for VMs] *************************************
ok: [lab2-vm01] => {
"msg": "The public IP is 40.85.247.231."
}
You can now ssh in. First decrypt your private key.
ansible-vault decrypt roles/azure-lab/files/id_rsa
ssh -i roles/azure-lab/files/id_rsa azureadmin@40.85.247.231
https://github.com/Azure-Samples/ansible-playbooks
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ansible/
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/scenario_guides/guide_azure.html