Experimenting with Azure

I’ve been experimenting with Microsoft Azure recently, and I thought it might be useful to share a quick post on using some of my favorite tools with Azure. I’ve found it useful to try to leverage existing tools whenever I can, and so as I’ve been experimenting with Azure I’ve been leveraging familiar tools like Docker Machine and Vagrant.

The information here isn’t revolutionary or unique, but hopefully it will still be useful to others, even if only as a “quick reference”-type of post.

Launching an Instance on Azure Using Docker Machine

To launch an instance on Azure and provision it with Docker using docker-machine:

docker-machine create -d azure \
--azure-subscription-id $(az account show --query "id" -o tsv) \
--azure-ssh-user azureuser \
--azure-size "Standard_B1ms" azure-test

The first time you run this you’ll probably need to allow Docker Machine access to your Azure subscription (you’ll get prompted to log in via a browser and allow access). This will create a service principal that is visible via az ad sp list. Note that you may be prompted for authentication for future uses, although it will re-use the existing service principal once it is created.

Launching an Instance Using the Azure Provider for Vagrant

See this page for complete details on using the Azure provider for Vagrant. Basically, it boils down to these four steps:

1. Install the Azure provider using vagrant plugin install vagrant-azure.
2. Add a “dummy” box (similar to how you use Vagrant with AWS; see this post).
3. Set up an Azure service principal for Vagrant to use to connect to Azure.
4. Run vagrant up and you’re off to the races.

A more detailed post on using Vagrant with Azure is available here; it provides a bit more information on the above steps.

Launching an Instance using the Azure CLI

OK, maybe the Azure CLI isn’t exactly an “existing tool,” but given my affinity for CLI-based tools I think it’s probably reasonable to include it here. To launch an instance using the Azure CLI, it would look something like this:

az vm create -n vm-name -g group-name --image UbuntuLTS \
--size Standard_B1ms --no-wait

Of course, this assumes a pre-existing resource group. More details are available here.

If you need to install the Azure CLI, see here or here for some additional information.

Happy experimenting!

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