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Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Overview

Previously you clicked your way through the Azure portal. This is a manual process that needs time. To not forget how it was done, it needs to be documented.

What if we want to setup infrastructure automatically? What we want to setup twenty resources in parallel? What if things broken and need to be destroyed and setup in as little time as possible and the exact same way it was previously built?

That's where infrastructure as code comes into play. You describe the infrastructure you need in code in either declarative or imperative way and let tooling do the changes needed in the cloud. The code then becomes the documentation and can be repeatedly run and builds the very same infrastructure on every run. Ideally, it is idempotent, which means changes only occur in the cloud when actually something has been changed in the code. Otherwise, no changes occur on subsequent runs.

Common tools to work with cloud include:

  • [Terraform]
  • [OpenTofu]
  • [Pulumi]

The three are cloud-agnostic, which means they can work on all common clouds.

Besides these, there are cloud-specific tools that work only on one cloud. For Azure cloud the following tools are provided by Microsoft to automate cloud resource management:

Setup with az

az is the Azure CLI tool. Using this command, you are effectively sending requests to the Azure API. The following example illustrates the steps needed to create a resource group in the region Switzerland North:

az login
az group create --name rg-mygroup-test-CHN --location switzerlandnorth
az group list -o table

Almost everything can be done using the command az.

Task: Setup a static web app using az

Setup another static web app using the tool az. To achieve this, create simple bash script setup.sh in a new subdir infra/. This script shall then call az to crate the static web app. The subcommands and arguments the tool needs are well doucmented.

Deploy with swa

Now you have an empty steatic web app running. Next step is to publish your journal. For this scenario, you shall do it manually from the CLI. You already know how to generate the website using zensical.

There is another nice CLI tool provided by Microsoft to publish the static web app to Azure, the Static Web Apps CLI, see also docs in Azure Static Web Apps documentation.

Task: Publish your journal to Azure using swa

Install the SWA CLI and then find your deployment key (either via portal or via az) and deploy the generated website to the newly generated static web app.