When Software Attacks!

Using References and Outputs in Azure Resource Templates

As you work more with Azure Resource Templates you will find that you need to pass information from one resource you have created into another. This is fine if you had the information to begin with within your variables and parameters, but what if it’s something you cannot know before deploy, such as the dynamic IP address of your new VM, or the FQDN of your new public IP address for your service?


Complex Azure Odyssey Part Four: WAP Server

Part One of this series covered the project itself and the overall template structure. Part Two went through how I deploy the Domain Controller in depth. Part Three talks about deploying my ADFS server and in this final part I will show you how to configure the WAP server that faces the outside world.

The Template

The WAP server is the only one in my environment that faces the internet. Because of this the deployment is more complex. I’ve also added further complexity because I want to be able to have more than one WAP server in future, so there’s a load balancer deployed too. You can see the resource outline in the screenshot below:


Complex Azure Template Odyssey Part Three: ADFS Server

Part One of this series covered the project itself and the overall template structure. Part Two went through how I deploy the Domain Controller in depth. This post will focus on the next server in the chain: The ADFS server that is required to enable authentication in the application which will eventually be installed on this environment.

The Template

The nested deployment template for the ADFS server differs little from my DC template. If anything, it’s even simpler because we don’t have to reconfigure the virtual network after deploying the VM. The screenshot below shots the JSON outline for the template.


Complex Azure Template Odyssey Part Two: Domain Controller

In part one of this series of posts I talked about the project driving my creation of these Azure Resource Templates, the structure of the template and what resource I was deploying. This post will go through the deployment and configuration of the first VM which will become my domain controller and certificate server. In order to achieve my goals I need to deploy the VM, the DSC extension and finally the custom script extension to perform actions that current DSC modules can’t. I’ll show you the template code, the DSC code and the final scripts and talk about the gotchas I encountered on the way.


An Introduction To Azure Resource Templates

I have spent a good deal of time over the last month or two building an Azure Resource Template to deploy a relatively complicated IaaS environment. In doing so I’ve hit a variety of problems along the way and I though that a number of blog posts were in order to share what I’ve learned. I will write a detailed post on certain specific servers within the environment shortly. This post will describe Azure Resource Template basics, problems I hit and some decisions I made to overcome issues. Further posts will detail my environment and specific solutions to creating my configuration.