Run Terraform With Azure Pipelines

This repo will walk you through an approach to provisioning Azure resources using Terraform code stored in a Git repo and leverage Azure Pipelines (YAML-based) to deploy to dev, test, and prod environments (all in different subscriptions) with approval gates in front of test and prod environments.

Prerequisites

Azure Subscription

If you don’t have Azure, go sign up for a free account and come back.

Azure DevOps

If you do not already have an Azure DevOps organization, follow these instructions to create one.

Run Your Pipelines in Azure Container Instance

Background

• Microsoft-hosted Azure Pipeline agent run in the public space; therefore, they can only deploy to environments that are publicly accessible.
• Some organizations may need to deploy to target environments that are only accessible within private space (e.g., inside a Azure Virtual Network).
• When the target environment is not publicly accessible, deploying self-hosted pipelines agents are a common solution.
• Organizations can self-host Azure Pipeline agents on Linux, macOS, or Windows (physical or virtual machines) or Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets; however, this may introduce unwanted overhead in having to patch and maintain these machines.
• The alternative is to run an agent in a Docker container and host it in Azure Container Instance which can run inside of the organization’s virtual network and we’ll explore this option for the rest of this guide.

Architecture

Getting Started With Terraform on Azure

Check out the official Get Started - Azure tutorial here

Terraform basics

Download and Install

• Download terraform from https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html

• Extract the executable and add the folder to your PATH variable

• Open a shell and type terraform version

• The basic commands we’ll use are:

  • terraform init
  • terraform plan
  • terraform apply
  • terraform destroy

• I advise you to use the terraform fmt command often to ensure your scripts well formatted according to HashiCorp’s style conventions

Folder structure

Terrafrom executes on the files within a folder that are named with the .tf extension. Here is what a typical folder structure looks like: