Automation Archives

Using Azure pipelines to deploy ARM templates

27/02/201927/02/2019
by Martin Ehrnst

There’s many reasons that you would use an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template to deploy your Azure resources. And theres equally many ways to deploy this kind of template.

For simple one time deployments of Azure resources I tend to use PowerShell or AZ CLI, but lately I have ben busy trying to create a web api based on Azure Functions using C# and .NET core. For those who know me, that’s not straight foreward.
To make things even more diffucult, I wanted to use Azure DevOps and Pipelines to build and push my code. In order to do that, I had to have some infrastructure in place, so why wouldn’t I use Azure Pipelines to deploy the ARM template as well?

Create ARM template

In order to deploy Azure Resource Manager templates, you will need to create one. ARM templates are based on Json and follows a schema. This schema or rule set if you like, defines how you must structure your template.

There are two forms of deployment options. At a resource group level (most common) and subscription level deployment. Both uses the same kind of Json language but have two different schemas. You’ll find the current resource group deployment schema here (no need to read :))

If you are unfamiliar with Json and ARM templates I recommend you to read Microsofts official documentation and getting started guide which will show how you can find the template from an existing deploymen or create a new.

For reference, this is a simple template to deploy a web app, that I copied from Microsofts GitHub repo with a bunch of templates to get you started.

Adding ARM template along with your code

As I already mentioned deploy ARM template in a pipeline makes sense in many ways, especially if you have developed an application. This way you can control the infrastructure along side the code.

My Azure Function uses Cosmos DB and Key Vault as parts of it’s infrastructure. It is all developed in Visual Studio Code, and the whole thing is cutting edge for an old operations guy like me.

In the picture below you’ll see that I have structured my project in to two subfolders. One is holding the ARM templates, and the other one is for the acutal functions code. I did this so i would be able to chose artifacts from the build process in Azure DevOps pipelines. There might be a better way, but when i had everything in the same folder the templates was packed with the code and not available in deployment pipeline.

vscode function project with arm template folder

Set up the build pipeline

Not long ago I learned that there are two types of pipelines. Build pipelines and release pipelines. Build is used to pack up or actually build the application (same as pressing f5 in Visual Studio). Where release are used for pushing the application on to your infrastructure (and deploy the infra).

For reference. In Azure DevOps, my folder structure looks exactly the same

Next move over to pipelines and create a new release pipeline. From here chose your repository (I use Azure repos).

After chosing your repo, ou can chose to start from a template. My project is a .NET core application and I had no idea what was needed to build that, so a template worked nicely. Here you can chose what’s best for you’re project. The important pieces from an ARM template perspective comes in the next steps

Start out by filling in the obvious. A name and a server to do the build. In my case i run with Azure hosted 2017. In an on premises environment I would use private servers.

Add your templates as build artifacts

What you will need to do next is to take those Json files in your arm template catalog, and make them available as part of the build. You will have to add in a “Copy files” step and fill in a few properties. Pay attention to where I chose the source folder and the destination folder which have a variable reference, $(build.artifactstagingdirectory)/arm

Now. Hit save and queue. This will save your new (or edited pipeline) and start a build of your project.

By now you should also have a build running, and if you’re like me, exploring new stuff, you get used to this

In this particular error. The publish task for .NET core is missing www root folder. By trial and error I found that I had to make a few changes to my build pipeline. This is not a prerequisite for running ARM templates with Azure pipelines, but i figured I should add in everything I had to do for this project, both for my reference and for yours if needed.

I removed “publish web projects” as i don’t have an ordinary web project, but an Azure function based API.

When you remove this tick, the task will refere to your project file (.CSPROJ).

Here i should give a shout out to my trusty colleague Emil Kjelsrud for helping out, once again.

Hit save and queue once again. Voila!

Configure the release pipeline with ARM templates

When your build is successful, we’re close to launch our application on to Azure. We do that by configuring a release pipeline. It is possible to combine the two, but I like them separated.

Under Pipelines > Releases hit new. A new wizard will pop up. Either chose one that fit your purpose, or start from scratch. In my case I chose to start with app service deployment. One of the first things you notice is “some settings need attention.”

Required settings in this context are the connection to your Azure envirionment and subscription. You will need to configure this in order to continue. There are several methods available for connecting your pipelines to Azure. I have my pipeline deploying resources in a tenant and subscription that my user does not have access to. That configuration requires a SPN/App registration in Azure AD with the correct permissions.

After configuring your connection. Modify your pipeline by adding in your required Azure Resource Group Deployment tasks. Here comes a few important bits. Prior to setting up my pipeline, I have a resource group created already. If you want to have the resource group created during deployment. You can use the Azure CLI or Azure powershell tasks (or a template) to do so.

Continue to fill in the required parameters. Remember that I separated my application code and the templates in to separate folders? This is why. I can now chose from the same artifact what i want to deploy, as the build pipeline have them available in their respective folders. Chose the template and your parameters file.

In this Azure DevOps environment we have an extension available that parses all outputs from your ARM templates. This way I can use variables from the previous step in my app service deployment. If you dont have this extension available, you can achieve the same result using PowerShell

Create the release

You’re pipeline is now complete. Save and create a release, the pipeline should now pick up the latest build and deploy your code to Azure. You can follow the whole process in Azure, under resource group > deployment and in Azure DevOps

After a few minutes (or seconds) depending on your configuration, you should have both your infrastructure and the actual application available.

Final thoughts

While I understand many of the concepts around infrastructure as code, continious integration and so on, I don’t always use the correct terms, so thank you for reading.

I hope you also have a greater understanding around the concepts, and also how you can utilize the possibilities available. My thoughts working with projects like this is always bound to the operational side. I know I’m going to use more ARM templates in Azure Pipelines, but probably not along side the actual code, as that’s not my day-to-day work. Again, I see my self working more and more with these Dev tools, and thats why I like to say that this is how we do modern Ops.

I leared a few more tips and tricks during this small project, so expect a few more posts soon.

Automation

Serverless application with PowerShell: Azure Event Grid

30/05/201829/05/2018
by Martin Ehrnst

This is part one of my blog series describing how you can create a serverless application infrastructure using PowerShell. The scope and history behind, covered in the introduction post. If you haven’t read that I recommend doing so.

Azure Event Grid

In my serverless infrastructure design, I have chosen to use Azure Event Grid as a hub for the other components in play. The other components will write and subscribe to events/messages in Event Grid and perform their given task as ‘their’ event arrives. Event grid fit’s the concept perfectly as you act on state changes. You can publish as many events you like, but you don’t need to subscribe to every one. A lot of Azures PaaS offerings are already fully integrated which makes it easy to get started.

Other event based offerings in Azure are Service Bus and Event Hub. You can read a little on the differences here

Set up Event Grid custom topic

I am sure you are able to create resources in Azure so here’s a quick one. Feel free to use what ever you want for deployment, but for the purpose of screenshots, I’m using the portal. Just remember that the name you chose will be the url of your endpoint as well.

After the custom topic is successfully deployed, you are given the option to subscribe to events. Before doing that we are taking a break. Besides a graph showing incoming events you have no good way to see your events as they arrive. This makes it way more difficult to debug why stuff isn’t working. While writing this post I researched for a good way to solve this and stumbled across this blog post by David Barkol. He created a web app that lets you view events as they arrive. You can deploy it directly from GitHub using ARM. Do this while your coffee is brewing. And come back here in 10 minutes 🙂

Subscribe to Event Grid topic

Welcome back… If you have deployed the web app you can follow and create a subscription subscribing to all events. In a production scenario, it’s likely to have scoped your subscribers, but in order for Event grid viewer to function i’ll subscribe to everything.

Once deployed your overview page will look something like this. Showing all subscriptions within your topic and their corresponding metrics. Now lets try to send a custom event using powershell.

Send event to event grid using PowerShell

Basically, event grid accepts post request to an API endpoint, which is the name of your topic plus a suffix and the API version. your full URI looks something like this; https://adatumblogdemo.northeurope-1.eventgrid.azure.net/api/events?api-version=2018-01-01

To authenticate we will pass an ‘aeg-sas-key’ within our request header. You will find the keys for authentication in the keys pane. Further event grid events has a schema you willl need to follow, meaning that all post requests will need to have some properties defined and your custom event data will be in a data property. The basics of it all looks like this

[ { "topic": string, "subject": string, "id": string, "eventType": string, "eventTime": string, "data":{ "custom": "data" }, "dataVersion": string, "metadataVersion": string } ]

More details on the schema can be found on Msft Docs

If we combine everything we know this far, we can use the script below to post messages to event grid. Please add your own url and access key. Everything else should work.

Assuming no error messages, jump in to your event grid viewer to view the raw content like this;

A corresponding graph in the Azure portal could look something like this. Here you will see incoming events and how many matches your subscriptions in the same graph. You can also see individual metrics per subscription.

Summary

In this part of my blog series on how to create a serverless application infrastructure using PowerShell. We have walked through how to set up a custom Event Grid topic and how to post messages or event to it using standard PowerShell commandlets. We also deployed a custom web application capable of reading our incoming events in real time.

In the next part: For part two we are going to create an Azure Function running PowertShell that subscribes and send Event Grid messages. This is key to build up our infrastructure wich consists of multiple Azure Functions in order to work.

Automation

Creating a serverless application with Powershell: Introduction

08/05/201807/08/2018
by Martin Ehrnst

Welcome, fellow IT pro. You have found the blog series describing how you can create a serverless application infrastructure with Powershell.

If you consider your self being a ‘modern it pro’, you frequently solve complex tasks and automate your work using code. You know what Git is and have heard people talk about continuous integration. If you can relate, let’s label you a ‘modern it pro’.

When I develop solutions that challenge my knowledge, I often seek advice from our developers. (You know, those who are employed to ‘GIT commit’?) Usually they can share some light on the issue and point me in the right direction.
By developing our own solutions, we have a working proof-of-concept to handover to our developers when things grow too big or complex.

The original challenge

The challenge or scope for my POC was to streamline creation of Azure tenants for our customers. We required to create a tenant, assign subscriptions and do some configuration within Azure AD. Many of these steps was already solved with various scripts, but it is time to consolidate and automate the automation. We decided that we wanted to learn more around the integration and ‘serverless’ PAAS offerings available in Azure.
For the purpose of this blog series we are going to build a new application using the same techniques, in a smaller scale. To create our serverless application infrastructure, we make use of the following Azure offerings:

Pizza ordering

I bet you have worked a fair amount of overtime in your career, therefore eaten a lot of pizza as well. Let’s try to build a simple pizza order and delivery process using Event Grid as integration layer and multiple Azure Functions to process the order.

We will break the pizza order and delivery process in to the following steps:

Customer creates/orders a pizza online
Send orderdata to event grid
Azure function subscribe to the “new order” event
Create a new event when pizza is in oven
Post new event when pizza is cooked and ready for delivery
Create a new event when pizza is sent to customer.

Parts in this blog series

Automation

Creating Azure AD Application using Powershell

10/04/201828/02/2019
by Martin Ehrnst

Azure AD Application

Azure AD have something called Application registrations. These are often used to integrate with external services and can provide functionality like Single Sign On to your companies Twitter account. There’s a large selection of applications you can chose from in the Azure Portal, but this post will cover how to create your own application registration using Powershell.

In this scenario we are creating an app that can access Azure Activity Logs, used by our on premise Splunk environment. Since I am doing this across 300 tenants the manual approach isn’t feasible.

High level overview

Create the app using Powershell
Assign the required API access to the new app
Create access key
Create new Azure AD Service Principal for our app (SPN)
Assign ‘Reader’ role to subscription

Create the app using Powershell

This is the easiest part. Azure Powershell have a pretty simple Cmdlet that let’s you create a new application, New-AzureADApplication. The required steps is to Import AzureRM modules and AzureAD modules. After that, connect to Azure AD using

Connect-AzureAD -Credential -TenantId "domain.onmicrosoft.com"

Now you can run New-AzureAdApplication to create a new app, this example shows the required fields.

New-AzureADApplication -DisplayName "Adatum App Demo" -IdentifierUris "https://localhost/AdatumAppDemo" -HomePage "https://localhost/Adatum"

and in returnObjectId AppId DisplayName -------- ----- ----------- 2cd0a284-7b9e-4 34ecfd2a-8f78-38c4a8b0 Adatum App Demo

In the Azure portal we can see our new app registration, but it does not have a service principal, and no API access. If you would have gone through the steps creating the app in the portal it self SPN and a “read basic profile” API permission would be added to your app by default.

Assign required API access

This is where I spent the most time. In order to assign permissions to our Azure AD Application we will need to write a bit of code. Applications can be assigned Application Permissions and Delegated permissions. According to the documentation New-AzureAdApplication Cmdlet takes a parameter “RequiredResourceAccess”. This again wan’t something of ‘Microsoft.Open.AzureAD.Model.RequiredResourceAccess’ as a generic list. Using my favourite search engine I found that I also needed to construct this object and add multiple objects (the permissions) to it.

Luckily my friend Jan Vidar Elven (MVP) had an example. A sligthly different approach, but here’s what I did. My app needed access to Azure Service Management API, manually I added this via the portal and explored the JSON manifest to see what GUIDs was added. Later I found a better solution, exploring the Service Principal (API’s) using Get-AzureADServicePrincipal.

Get-AzureADServicePrincipal -All $true | Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -eq "Windows Azure Service Management API"}

which will return something like this.

ObjectId AppId DisplayName -------- ----- ----------- 28a1249a-c5bb-4c7b-b94d-064ca5bb1952 797f4846-ba00-4fd7-ba43-dac1f8f63013 Windows Azure Service Management API

Then I could start to build my permission object

## Azure Management API $AzureMgmtPrincipal = Get-AzureADServicePrincipal -All $true | Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -eq "Windows Azure Service Management API"} $AzureMgmtAccess = New-Object -TypeName "Microsoft.Open.AzureAD.Model.RequiredResourceAccess" $AzureMgmtAccess.ResourceAppId = $AzureMgmtPrincipal.AppId

If you had used this object with the ‘RequiredResourceAccess’ parameter now, the app would have assigned Windows Azure Service Management API, but no permissions. Just to be clear, this is the permissions I am talking about

You can explore the same permissions using
$AzureMgmtPrincipal.AppRoles for application permissions and $AzureMgmtPrincipal.Oauth2Permissions for delegated permissions. Azure Management only have one delegated permission

PS C:\> $AzureMgmtPrincipal.Oauth2Permissions
AdminConsentDescription : Allows the application to access the Azure Management Service API acting as users in the organization. AdminConsentDisplayName : Access Azure Service Management as organization users (preview) Id : 41094075-9dad-400e-a0bd-54e686782033 IsEnabled : True Type : User UserConsentDescription : Allows the application to access Azure Service Management as you. UserConsentDisplayName : Access Azure Service Management as you (preview) Value : user_impersonation

Who doesen’t love GUIDs?

Now add this permission to a new ‘microsoft.open.azuread.model.resourceAccess’ object

$AzureSvcMgmt = New-Object -TypeName "microsoft.open.azuread.model.resourceAccess" -ArgumentList "41094075-9dad-400e-a0bd-54e686782033", "Scope" before you add that permission object to the ‘resource access object’ created earlier.

$AzureMgmtAccess.ResourceAccess = $AzureSvcMgmt

If you where adding multiple permissions, repeat the above. After you completed this step, our first object $AzureMgmtAccess have an app ID assigned (Azure management api) with the corresponding Resource access object(s)
ResourceAppId ResourceAccess ------------- -------------- 797f4846-ba00-4fd7-ba43-dac1f8f63013 {class ResourceAccess {...

Now you can re-run our first command but add the permission parameter (delete the app created earlier or change the identifier)

New-AzureADApplication -DisplayName "Adatum App Demo" -IdentifierUris "https://localhost/AdatumAppDemo" -HomePage "https://localhost/Adatum" RequiredResourceAccess @($AzureMgmtAccess)

Check your portal now 🙂

Application Access Key

We have to create an access key for us to programmatically logging in via the application. Depending on your scenario, you might want to create multiple keys, but in this example I am sticking with one. Just like in the Azure portal you will specify the validity time for your key. The example below will add a key wich expire in one year.

New-AzureADApplicationPasswordCredential -ObjectId $AdatumDemoApp.ObjectId -CustomKeyIdentifier "Access Key" -EndDate (get-date).AddYears(1)

If you want the key to not be activated immediately, set the appropriate date time by using StartDate parameter.

Create new Azure AD service principal

For our application to access within our tenant, we need to assign a new service principal. The security principle will allow us to access the subscription (or other resources for that matter.) You can read more about security principals for users and services here, Application and service principal objects in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)

To create the service principal in via Powershell, run the following: New-AzureADServicePrincipal -AppId -Tags @("WindowsAzureActiveDirectoryIntegratedApp")
Pay attention to that tag. It is required if you want the app to show under app integrations in the Azure AD portal view. Documented here

RBAC / IAM subscription access

The app I am creating is used to read Azure activity logs. To be allowed to read these logs, the app must be assigned ‘Read’ permission on the subscription level. To assign a new role, use the New-AzureRmRoleAssignment cmdlet, using ObjectID, RoleDefinitionName and Scope as input parameters.

New-AzureRmRoleAssignment -ObjectId 'SPN objectId' -RoleDefinitionName "Reader" -Scope "/subscriptions/$SubScriptionId"

PS: When you put the complete script together, you will find that the SPN is create async in Azure Resource Manager. Meaning that you will get the output, but the principal isn’t created. To get around this in our provisioning I created a while loop. Not the prettiest you will find, but works for now.

while ($addRole.DisplayName -ne $AzureSplunkAdApp.DisplayName ) { Start-Sleep -Seconds 5 Write-Verbose "Waiting for SPN to create" $addRole = New-AzureRmRoleAssignment -ObjectId $AzureSplunkAdAppAppSPN.ObjectId -RoleDefinitionName "Reader" -Scope "/subscriptions/$SubScriptionId" }

Final script

I have put together a complete script which will create this demo application. No error handling and your risk 🙂

Automation

Activate Webasto diesel heater using OMS and Azure functions

03/10/2017
by Martin Ehrnst

Looking at the above picture snow and winter is pretty awesome, but when you have to fire up your car outside your cabin in -15c (5f) you wish for summer. Not only is it extremely hard for your engine, but it’s also ridiculously cold to get inside the car! That’s why many cars in Norway are equipped with preheaters. A unit you can activate before starting or entering the car, heating up the engine (and in many cases the interior as well).
Just to put some numbers down, average temperature in Oslo January 2017 was -4.3, and coldest -12.6.

My child carrier, a Range Rover Sport, (one of Britains fines engineering that never fails) is equipped with a Webasto pre heater and controlled remotely by SMS command or an app. Communication is using WBUS, Webasto’s own language.

My goal in this post is to use data from the OMS Weather Data solution and Azure functions to automatically start my Webasto heater based on the observed temperature. I have to say, using the app directly way easier, but this is a very good opportunity to explore and play with cars, azure and automation.

Starting the heater

Many of these heaters and apps only communicate using SMS commands, but my heater controller can use internet connection as well, meaning there is an API of some sort it’s communicating with.

Using fiddler I found out how the app was communicating, replicating it using Powershell I ended up with this as a simple function to send commands to my heater. Typical commands are “cmd_heater_status” which asks for current status, and “cmd_time1:30,start” that starts the heater for 30 minutes.

To be honest, I wasn’t very pleased with the security here, but that’s something I will notify the company who make these controllers about.

Below is a typical output after requesting heater status.

heater : 1 gsm : 7 voltage : 12.0 h_temp : 25 flame : 0 date : 2017-10-1 19:13:9 valid : 1 status_date : 01/10 status_fdate : 01.10.2017 status_time : 21:13:09

Creating the Azure Function

After we have the basic functionality in place, we can add some logic to our script and create an Azure Function out of it. I have created a basic Powershell function below that accepts two input parameters. TempLow the temperature you have to be below to fire the heater, and heatingMinutes which is the number of minutes the heater will run.

The rest of the script is using our function above to request statuses and act upon our input and the heater response. I had to add sleep time within the script so that the Webasto controller had time process my commands.
Parameters like email-address and heaterId are defined as function environment variables

OMS / Log Analytics setup – query and alert.

Using data from the weather solution I created together with Cameron Fuller i created the following query to alert when observed temperature in Oslo is below a certain degree. This search is based on the new query language, Kusto. I reccommend everyone (including my self) to take a look at this Kusto cheet sheet.
YRno_CL | where LocationName_s == "Oslo" and TimeGenerated > ago(2h) | summarize AggregatedValue = avg(ObservedTemp_d) by bin(TimeGenerated, 15m), LocationName_s

Create an metric based alert based on the above query.

To kick off our Azure Function we set the alert to send a webhook with a custom json payload looking like this: (yes testing values)
{ "tempLow": "59", "heatingMinutes": "40" }

The test says webhook is sent successfully, and our function log confirms 🙂

Calm down John Snow, let winter come.

Using Azure pipelines to deploy ARM templates

Create ARM template

Adding ARM template along with your code

Set up the build pipeline

Add your templates as build artifacts

Configure the release pipeline with ARM templates

Create the release

Final thoughts

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Serverless application with PowerShell: Azure Event Grid

Azure Event Grid

Set up Event Grid custom topic

Subscribe to Event Grid topic

Send event to event grid using PowerShell

Summary

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Creating a serverless application with Powershell: Introduction

The original challenge

Pizza ordering

Parts in this blog series

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Creating Azure AD Application using Powershell

Azure AD Application

High level overview

Create the app using Powershell

Assign required API access

Application Access Key

Create new Azure AD service principal

RBAC / IAM subscription access

Final script

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Activate Webasto diesel heater using OMS and Azure functions

Starting the heater

Creating the Azure Function

OMS / Log Analytics setup – query and alert.

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