Azure ACME Foundation Templates

See the feature-modular branch for a better way, that will be merged in due time.

TODO

• Key vault
• Service Map agent
• Front-end load balancers
• Docker registry and Jenkins
• Postgres PaaS
• Check timezones and locales in cloud-config
• Automation account?
• Tag solutions and OMS
• Split monitoring and networking
• Windows variant
• Timestamp deployments
• Full diagnostics and OMS configuration (solutions, dashboards, container support)
• Docker CE repository added to all servers to ease deployment
• Generic layer template
• Jumpbox and diagnostics storage account
• Networking

Note: Right now all VMs start a redis container for testing OMS monitoring. That will be removed in the future.

What

This is a set of scripts to generate and deploy Azure Resource Manager templates for multi-tier, multi-tenant solutions.

A tenant is defined as a set of resource groups, each of which maps to a typical application tier or environment:

• foundation (networking, OMS monitoring and an SSH jumpbox)
• data (IaaS database servers)
• middleware (app servers)
• frontend (front-end servers)
• devops (Jenkins, etc.)

This is what the default monitoring dashboard looks like after a few minutes:

This is what it all looks like deployed, if you hide away storage and other inconsequentials:

Why

I needed a set of re-usable Azure templates that brought together a number of (sometimes quite widely disseminated) aspects of Linux infrastructure management (like diagnostics and monitoring) and that enabled me to get large-scale projects up to speed quickly.

As such, these templates have a number of distinguishing features from the standard Microsoft samples:

• Everything is CLI-driven. Templates never leave your machine and are never published to a public URL
• All layes share a foundation networking infrastructure and can be developed/tweaked independently
• Server configurations include full Linux/Docker diagnostics, logging and monitoring, including a free tier OMS instance and sample dashboards
• Linux package provisioning leverages cloud-config, making it easier to re-use existing on-premises (or competing providers') configurations
• Resources and resource groups are namespaced and tagged to make it easy to deploy and manage multiple copies of the same solution for separate tenants

Why ACME? well, because I loved the Warner Bros. cartoons, and because these templates aim to let you do everything you'd possibly need to get your infrastructure running and usable in under an hour.

How

• make keys - generates an SSH key for managing the servers
• make params - generates ARM template parameters
• make deploy-foundation - deploys the networking layer, the jumpbox, a diagnostics storage account and OMS for all servers
• make deploy-<layername> - deploys a named layer using the generic-layer template
• make endpoints - list DNS aliases
• make destroy-<layername> - destroys the named layer

Recommended Sequence

# edit the Makefile to set the tenant name
# edit genparams.py to map layers to cloud-config files, set tags, etc.
az login
make keys
make params
make deploy-foundation
make deploy-data
make deploy-middleware
make deploy-frontend
make endpoints
make ssh

Requirements

• GNU make
• Python 3
• The new Azure CLI (pip install -U azure-cli will install it)