Provisioning

We are going to need some machines to run our application, and they will need to be initialized with cluster management software. In addition to the virtual machines needed to run our application, we will need to provision storage accounts, availability sets, virtual networks, and load balancers. We might even need to provision some additional Microsoft Azure hosted services like a Service Bus, Azure DocumentDB, or Azure SQL Database.

We can break provisioning down into two high level concerns: outside the box and inside the box. Provisioning outside the box would include creating all the correct resources like networking, virtual machines, and similar. Inside the box would be anything that needs to set up inside the service, such as cluster management software.

A big challenge with infrastructure has been the capability to reliably recreate an environment. Machines and networks are provisioned, configurations are changed, and other machines are added or removed. Even if all this is documented, tracking the changes and working through manual steps is error-prone, and rarely ends with exactly the same environment setup. Automating infrastructure provisioning can help here, and we can apply a lot of the best practices for managing application code to managing our infrastructure.

Let’s start with a quick overview of infrastructure as code and the services used in Microsoft Azure to provision and manage our resources.