As regular readers will know I really like the tools provided by Hashicorp↗ and today I found an excuse to use one. I needed to bring up a Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure↗ . I hadn’t logged into Azure for quite a while so imagine my shock when I opened the dashboard, it’s not that great and the beta of the new one isn’t that brilliant either. It was so bad I tweeted about it ….

I had recently looked at Terraform↗ for another project and I worked through the excellent getting started guide which covers how to launch AWS Instances↗ .

I decided that it maybe more straight forward to launch my test Virtual Machines using Terraform rather than going through the dashboard, apart from the storage container which I created ahead of launching my configuration.

Terraform is straight forward to install if you have Homebrew↗ installed, none Mac users can follow the install guide↗ .

Terraform & Azure 1/6
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There is a Cask version of terraform, this does not ship with the Azure provider so use the main brew package instead. Graphviz↗ is installed so that the graph functionality can be used.

I downloaded a copy of my Publish Settings from https://manage.windowsazure.com/publishsettings↗ and renamed the file to settings.publishsettings. I then created terraform configuration (which can be found in the following repo https://github.com/russmckendrick/terraform-examples/tree/master/azure↗ ).

First off I checked everything was OK with the configuration using terraform plan;

Terraform & Azure 2/6
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As you can see everything is good to go, I also generated graphical overview using terraform graph which shows how it looks;

Terraform & Azure 3/6
terraformgraph|dot-Tpng>graph.png

graph

As everything looked good it was time to apply the configuration and launch the Virtual Machine using terraform apply;

Terraform & Azure 4/6
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As you can see from the GUI below it launched the Cloud Service and Virtual Machine as defined.

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I then used terraform show to query my instance to get the computed elements of the configuration;

Terraform & Azure 5/6
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I connected to the Virtual Machine, did what I had to do (thats a whole other blog post) and then finally tore down the Virtual Machine and Cloud Service using terraform destroy;

Terraform & Azure 6/6
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As a Mac / Linux user I found the whole experience to be a lot more what I am used to with other cloud services and a lot less “Microsoft” than I feared.