Today I thought lets try Azure as a cloud provider because I have never used Azure. I have used a couple of different other cloud provider but for whatever reason never Azure. First I had a look into how to provison resources on Azure in an automatd manner. Their own provisioning tool is Azure Resource Manager which is a DSL that must be written in json. Well, this is for me as an vim user. So that I have decided to do my first tries using a tool I am familier with. So that I have tried Terraform which is a nother language but from my perspective by far simpler to write using a simple text editor.

Prerequesites⌗

• You must have an Azure accunt.
• This how-to is written for linux. For other operating systems commands and behaviour might be different.

Preperation⌗

Installing Terraform

curl -O -L https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/1.0.7/terraform_1.0.7_linux_amd64.zip
terraform_1.0.7_linux_amd64.zip
terraform -version

Installing Azure CLI

curl -L https://aka.ms/InstallAzureCli | bash

Getting Started⌗

Login via Azure CLI

az login
az account show

Write main.tf

I had a look into the examples from terraform-prodiver-azurerm and compiled this simple main.tf which will only provision an Azure Resource Group.

# Configure the Azure provider
terraform {
  required_providers {
    azurerm = {
      source  = "hashicorp/azurerm"
      version = "~> 2.78"
    }
  }

  required_version = ">= 1.0.7"
}

provider "azurerm" {
  features {}
}

resource "azurerm_resource_group" "rg" {
  name     = "test-rg"
  location = "westus2"
}

Initialize Terraform

terraform init

Format Configuraton

terraform fmt

Validate Configuraton

terraform validate

Plan Configuration

terraform plan

Apply Configuration

terraform apply

That’s it for a getting started.