Deploy Bicep/ARM using Containers

Developing using containers offers the ability to use different environments and software without having to install them on your development workstation, while at the same time you conserve a lot of system resources avoiding the use of virtual machines. Visual Studio Code has been receiving a lot of functionality towards that end with a great deal of extensions and part of that is targeting Azure template developement. 

We can use VS Code to develop our code and then use a container with all the Azure tools to deploy. This post describes this very process, from docker installation to VS Code configuration and finally template deployment. 

First we need to install all the necessary components on our system. This includes Docker Desktop, Visual Studio Code and a patch for the linux kernel of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2).

You can find Docker Desktop on the official Docker page here and VS Code on its page over here. The Docker installation wizard will add any required Windows features to your machine, so there's no reason to worry about that. The only thing that you'll have to manually install is the WSL 2 patch that you can get from here. We don't need anything special here so use the default installation options.

Next, we need to configure VS Code with a couple of Docker extensions. Open VS Code, switch to the extensions page and install "Docker" and "Remote - Containers" just like below (hover to animate):

To make things easier with the templates that we're going to create, you can also install the Bicep and/or ARM extensions. In this post, we're going to develop and deploy a Bicep file.

After you open the folder that contains the template file (or your project), you'll have to add a container configuration to your project. Open the Command Pallete and search for "Remote-Containers: Add" to get the command to add development container configuration. In this case I'm using the Azure Bicep community image with .Net Core 3.1. If you're deploying ARM you can use the Azure CLI image.

As soon as the configuration is added, VS Code will prompt you to re-open the workspace but this time it will be in the container. This will start the container build process that may take a while.

VS Code will now create new objects that appear on the docker console, including an image, a container based on that image, and a volume.

The container is the system that we are going to be using to run our Azure commands:

This container will be based on the image the we have selected earlier:


The volume that will be created is the way for the container to access the files in our project folder stored on our workstation:

When the container is configured, you can start a new terminal and connect directly to it (hover to animate):

From this point on, the deployment process is exactly the same as if you were using Azure CLI on your machine. You just connect to your Azure account and deploy the template (hover to animate):

That pretty much how you can develop Bicep and ARM on your machine and use Azure CLI on a container to perform the deployment!


Popular posts from this blog

Domain Controller Machine Password Reset

Image
On my lab environment, I've configured two Active Directory sites since most enterprises have offices in more that one places. My lab however is not running 24/7 and the domain controllers in the second site are rarely turned on in order to save resources. This leads to issues with the Active Directory replication such as the "The target principal name is incorrect" error when I execute:  repadmin /syncall /AdeP. To remedy the issue, we have to reset the machine password of the domain controller that has been offline. First off, we are going to stop and disable the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (kdc) service on the problematic domain controller, in our case DC4. There may be some tickets in the cache so we should also clear them using klist purge Now it's time to change the machine password of the domain controller using the command netdom resetpwd /s:dc3 /ud:lab\administrator /pd:* Replace the "lab\administrator" with an account on your...
Keep reading

Managing Active Directory User Certificates using PowerShell

I first came across user certificates when I was working with email certificates a few years ago and I have to admit that I had trouble updating the certificates on the objects! Most organizations have a Microsoft Active Directory Certification Authority that issues the certificates used internally. When a certificate is issued to a user, the Microsoft Certificate Service saves the public key in Active Directory. The userCertificate attribute is a multi-valued attribute that contains the DER-encoded X509v3 certificates issued to the user. Although we rarely need to pay attention to this attribute, there are cases where we have to update it. To make things easier, I've written PowerShell functions to Get, Remove, Import and Export the certificates on that field. To get the list of certificates for an object, use the Get-ActiveDirectoryObjectCertificate function: PS C:\> Get-ActiveDirectoryObjectCertificate -UserPrincipalName cpolydorou@lab.local DistinguishedName  ...
Keep reading

Configuring a Certificate on Exchange Receive Connector

Today's article is about configuring Exchange receive connectors with specific certificates. Out of the box, Exchange uses self signed certificates to provide TLS secured mail flow. This will definitely be an issue if you expose the SMTP protocol to client computers since they won't trust the certificate. In this article we are going to configure a certificate that was issued by a third part authority to the Client Frontend receive connector. We'll start with getting the thumbprint of the certificate using the Get-ExchangeCertificate cmdlet: [PS] C:\> Get-ExchangeCertificate Thumbprint                               Subject ----------                               ------- 241B864DC82C664FECBA18B8D54987AAFB65B4C2 CN=*.lab.com, ... D4D210886B34E690191A1F008C78FDD0E7325DD4 CN=Exchange2013A 960171662EB26116...
Keep reading