DSC and Azure

Hi Guys,

I am wondering if someone knows a good documentation on how to deploy azure resources from my local computer? When I search for it people are usually writing on deploying these things with dsc extensions and that I need to be logged on azure portal. I would like to create configurtion, new vm with storage accounts, network etc. from my local computer and push it to the azure? I mean here to have configuration that I can use over and over again without login into azure portal and creating those from portal. Is that possible like doing it with powershell?

[quote quote=114343]Hi Guys,

I am wondering if someone knows a good documentation on how to deploy azure resources from my local computer? When I search for it people are usually writing on deploying these things with dsc extensions and that I need to be logged on azure portal. I would like to create configurtion, new vm with storage accounts, network etc. from my local computer and push it to the azure? I mean here to have configuration that I can use over and over again without login into azure portal and creating those from portal. Is that possible like doing it with powershell?[/quote]

Well, that’s a broad question. First question that you want to ask yourself is, do you want to go the ‘imperative way’ or the ‘declarative way’? Quite frankly, both ways get the job done. I would suggest however, if you start from scratch, choose the declarative way. Tools like Terraform and Ansible give you a good foundation to start from. Especially Terraform is perfectly suitable to spinup resources in Azure. If you combine that with the Azure PowerShell DSC extension and a Automation Account (in which you host your DSC configurations), then you have a very powerful provisioning/configuration setup.

Microsoft has pretty good documentation.

I would recommend using Visual Studio (Not code, but you can do it in Code also) to create your templates.

There are also some videos on Youtube from Ignite, that should be helpful. In fact there are tonnes of great Azure Ignite videos uploaded recently.

Personally, I create all my ARM Templates in VS Code, I’ve found it to be the best code editor for DSC, Azure Powershell etc. Just make sure you installed the necessary extension. For ARM you’ll need Azure Resource Manager Tools.

There is several online Mooc you can use to learn Infrastructure as a Code

You can use edx, it’s free and there is a course about IaC (with online Lab)

https://www.edx.org/course/infrastructure-as-code-1

It covers Arm template, Azure automation, Azure DSC …