I want to create an automation demo for customers, where I have a single page web app with a couple of input text fields, and the inputs get used as parameters in the creation of an Azure Resource Group and VNETs/VMs/etc within the Resource Group.
I can do all of the above with Azure CLI (v2.0) on my laptop, and also from CLI using a Azure CLI in a bash script on a Linux server, but I wanted something web-based. I considered standing up a web page on the Linux server to call the bash script, but that seems a bit painful (especially with permissions etc). I also thought maybe Azure Functions could provide a solution to host the single web page app and call the Azure CLI commands, but I've never used Functions before so not sure if Functions can do this; the description of Functions' capabilities aren't clear to me.
What is the best way to achieve what I'm after, quickly?
Note I'm not a developer, I'm a network engineer, so whilst I can hack around in a few languages from Notepad and vi, I'm not looking to build something in a full SDK, or have something with enterprise-level reliability, version control, etc. This is really all about proof of concept and web-based demo of something I already have in Azure CLI / bash script.
Thanks in advance :-)
For a quick and relatively dirty way, you could create an Azure Runbook (using the scripts created from the Azure Portal) and invoke using the Automation API This could use the scripts (or close to) what you already have.
When you roll out a new service in Azure you get the option now to download the Automation Script, you can then follow this article to deploy the generated script via a runbook
To follow on from Jamie's idea.
You can code your Azure Cli script (or Powershell) into an Azure Automation Runbook, you can have variables etc to access it with.
You can then attach a webhook to that runbook, and call it from a standard HTTP Post request.
Meaning you could create a HTML form, that would pass whatever variables are required and build whatever is needed.
The downside of this would be that you will be creating it on your infrastructure.
You can have a solution that will deploy to someone else's infrastructure with a deploy to Azure button
This lets you host it in Github etc, it takes a bit more knowledge to make it work but saves your account dollars!
Related
I have created a Function App which hosts PowerShell scripts and its main purpose is to add new users to Azure AD.
I want to get this onto a Web App with a simple GUI such as; First Name, Sure name, and E-mail address and a submit button.
I want to know what the simplest way to achieve this would be? And if it is possible to do.
Thank you for your help!
You could use an Azure Static WebApp to host your form and then have it call the Azure Function to submit the form.
Azure statis webapp docs here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/static-web-apps/getting-started?tabs=vanilla-javascript
Adding an API here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/static-web-apps/add-api?tabs=vanilla-javascript
Granted this is all in javascript but the front end would need to be in html/js anyway.
Other alternatives are something like PowerShell Universal if you wanted everything to be in PowerShell.
https://ironmansoftware.com/powershell-universal
I've heard good things about it but never actually used it myself
Our school has an Imagine subscription, which allows lecturers and students to sign up for Azure for Students.
Now we would like to create a HTML5 web service as described in this tutorial: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service-web/app-service-web-get-started-html
The problem is, that we can not use Cloud Shell, because it keeps asking for Microsoft.Storage, which is apparently not included in Azure for Students?
How could we resolve this problem and succeed with the above mentioned "HTML5 web app tutorial" with our "Azure for Students accounts"?
Best regards, András
The Cloud Shell is a convinient feature, but not a requierment to go through the sample.
You can install the Azure CLI localy to your machine:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cli
Once you have the CLI installed, you can run the same commands locally from your machine. This does not require you to have a storage account.
Bryan is correct in his posting above, you should be able to complete your web apps scenario without Cloud Shell.
That being said, unfortunately the Imagine subscription is not enabled to provision cost-incurring resources. As a result you are correct you cannot access Cloud Shell without the pre-req of an Azure File share. However you can create an Azure free trial that provides credits to provision cost-incurring resources and thus would enable you access to Cloud Shell.
Azure resource manager power shell or JSON template to create Virtual machine in existing Virtual network and Storage account.
You can of course use either.
Json Template is basically what Azure Resource Manager (ARM) uses anway. Bonus: you can run your ARM templates from PowerShell :)
The question you want to ask is:
Will I be doing this repeatedly?
If so, ARM is the natural answer. You create a resource in a file that you can version control and use to repeated deployments.
If it's only a one-time thing, then PowerShell or Azure Command Line Tools are more than enough.
At first steps JSON templates may confuse you, because files are large (hundreds of lines). But templates are really readable and you can easy configure your architecture. Also there is a chance to make a syntax mistake or to violate existing restrictions - try to use smart editor.
For example, VS Code Editor.
PowerShell and multi-platform tool Azure CLI help you make the same requests to subscriptions but contain helpers, hints and validators which would help you easy set correct options.
I created my custom Azure Worker Role. This code is ready. What I'm trying to do is to create instances of this Azure-Worker-Role in specific Azure data-center, at the requested time. For example, I'm want to send command to Azure to create 10 instances of my Custom-Azure-Worker in West-Europe data-center - now.
It's important to pass this command also a parameter that will be the input problem to be solved by my workers.
I pretty sure that this automation task must be covered by Azure automation. Is that true? Looking for more information\directions.
Thank you!
You can use Azure Management Libraries to create and deploy your cloud services from C# code. Just create application (eg ASP.NET MVC) to manage your cloud services by sending commands and deploy it also on Azure or even keep it locally.
See this article for more details http://www.bradygaster.com/post/getting-started-with-the-windows-azure-management-libraries
You'll want to leverage the service management API to spin up and tear down roles. It can be accessed any number of way, including directly via REST.
RE: providing a parameter to the worker role, one option is leveraging the cloud service configuration file that you provide with the cspkg. Define specifics for the role there.
Depending on the complexity or simplicity of your scenario, you may also get away with simply having a table in storage that you personally poke with desired configuration values and that the worker can read to retrieve.
The Azure Automation service should definitely be able to automate this task for you. Anything you can script via the Azure PowerShell module, can be imported as a runbook and called manually, via a third-party system, or on a schedule in Azure Automation.
Whether there is an existing runbook for the specific task you are looking to automate, I do not know. But Azure Automation has a gallery of community-contributed content for many common processes, so this may be available there.
Is there any way to save the complete state of my azure configuration?
Basically, I just created a demo for a project I'm working on. This demo has a website/webjob, scheduler, storage queue, storage blob, redis cache and documentDB. I have configured these components in terms of size/scale/schedules but now the demo is done.
I don't want to pay for these services and I don't need them online for now. However, I don't want to have to recreate and reconfigure them if I need to relaunch the demo in a month.
Is there a way to save my current azure configurations to a file and then to be able to recreate all the services again automatically (with a script or a small program)?
Thanks!
This is a very good question, that sums up a historical problem we're in the process of making easier and more flexible. I'll answer this question with two parts.
First and foremost, you have tools like the PowerShell cmdlets now, that you can script out the creation of an entire "world" in Azure and then re-run whenever you want, against a subscription, to scaffold out a whole architecture. You can also use the management libraries for .NET to do this from a .NET application. When we embarked on the VS WebJobs tooling, for instance, I worked up a prototype for my developers on using MAML to create WebJobs and scheduler job collections. You can see the demo code for that here: https://github.com/bradygaster/maml-demo-scheduled-webjob-creator
We've also recently embarked on new mission of re-creating a lot of the management APIs so that they support the notion of templates and resource groups, to marry up with the new portal experience. Here's a great MSDN article that discusses how the PowerShell cmdlets for the Gallery could be used to pull down a list of the various templates that could then be pushed back up as fully-baked architectures running in Azure. You have the capability of building these templates yourself, then you could use these cmdlets to fan out and create things that you write up in your own custom templates. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn654596.aspx
Hope this helps!
For Azure websites you can use the Back and Restore option to store the site and restore it back when you want to demo again, But all you have to do is Stop the services and you should be able to keep the demo without incurring cost.