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.
Related
I am publishing an app to the Azure Marketplace. My offer is a VM. My use case is that i need the customer to enter some values that will be used to call a script in the VM. How can i pass custom variables to the VM during launch?
According to this you can only customize them with SKU's, so this means any post deployment configurations are to be done by the customer.
What you see to need is an Azure Application Offer. That one would contain a way to customize it.
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!
Runbooks can be used to stop/start classic and ARM Virtual Machines in Azure.
Is this also possible from an Azure Function?
Some good news to update this thread. You will be able to do that now in Azure Functions. The steps are documented here based on HTTP-triggered Functions.
Azure Function role like permissions to Stop Azure Virtual Machines
You may switch out the trigger type to fit your use-case.
See Ling's response above. We've addressed this now. :)
It's not currently possible to do this via the Azure PowerShell commandlets in Azure Functions. You can write against the Azure C# SDK or use the x-plat CLI (if you bring it yourself, as it isn't installed by default). You'll need to upload a cert or use a service account to perform those actions.
FYI - I'm on the Functions team and we're working on improving this story, in the near future. I'll update this answer once it's been made possible.
You can either use the Azure REST API from here -> Docs or make use of the SDK to do the operations.
Is it possible, using the Azure portal or some other means, to export the subscriptions configuration, for example as an XML file?
I mean things like details of web sites / roles, virtual machines, the size of the machines etc?
Then I could export every day and use a diff tool to check nothing has changed by mistake....
Just thought I'd ask before I write a giant PowerShell script.
I agree this would be a nice feature to have. It's often easier to build out the environment via the portal, but copying that from one tenant (dev) to another (prod) would be much faster and easier if it could be exported to JSON or XML and processed via PowerShell.
Azure Resource manager however does not support resources like Cloud Services, API Management, Mobile Services, Azure Scheduler, Azure Automation, Azure Active Directory, Recovery Services, Media Services, etc. ...
So the summary is - No, there is no such service yet to help you export all your subscriptions configurations.
If you just look for Virtual Machines and Web Sites, then Azure Resource Manager may be in help. But if you look for a complete backup - there is no way to easily achieve this today (2015-03-17).
Probably you could write some Powershell script combining the power of Azure Service Management + Azure Resource Manager, but frankly I am not really sure whether that would also help.
We are thinking of using Windows Azure for simulation. ~100 VM nodes each working on it's problem set and reporting back the result to a Master node.
I have created VM instances from the web UI. In order for this to work, we would need to use Azure API to bring servers up and shut them down once they are done.
Does anyone have any experience with something like this? I am looking for advise, gotchas etc.
thanks.
You sure can do it and I have helped other to make it happen on hundreds on nodes. Take a look at Windows Azure Rest API to configure your role as described here. While others may have other idea, I think the general steps would be as below:
Create a master machine or a webrole to manage your roles using REST API
Create a worker role instance and use it to clone multiple instances as if needed
Use REST API to start and shutdown worker role along with update the instance count when in need
Use Azure Boot Strapper to bootstrap the VM depend on your requirement
Azure REST based Service Management API can work from a web app or a standalone app, so you can also have a web role to make it happen from anywhere in world. This way you don't need any on premise components at all as it will be totally cloud solution. If you need any help on creating web role I sure can help.
You can provision Virtual Machines using Service Management REST API (there's also a managed API on NuGet).
But in your case you might want to consider using Cloud Services (PaaS). With Cloud Services you simply build your application, you package it and deploy it. Then using the portal or the management API you can simply configure the number of instances. There is even a command line tool (csmanage.exe) which allows you to to change the number of instances through the service configuration.