Taming Azure with Cloud
Agnostic DevOps Tools
Karthik Ramamoorthy
A guide to help you maintain end-to-end automation,
and to build reliable, repeatable and maintainable
infrastructure in Azure.
Cloud DevOps tools and ecosystems have matured. We are at a tipping point,
as we can now deploy multi-regional data centers with production-ready
applications in a matter of hours. Over the past few months CTP has imple-
mented such transformations in AWS, and we recently adopted the same strat-
egy to deploy on Azure in a more cloud agnostic way. In order to execute at a
faster pace, we made a few key technology decisions to let us make large strides
with Azure. This article reviews the technical facets of those decisions.
Zero Touch Deployments
The primary goal of the project is to build an end-to-end solution with almost
zero touch deployment. The solution should cover:
1. Image lifecycle management (ILM)
2. Infrastructure management
3. Logging and monitoring
4. Security and compliance
5. Application deployment
To meet the CISO requirements, any Azure marketplace image needs to be
hardened. The Chef marketplace holds some interesting cookbooks to harden
both Linux and Windows images. A combination of Packer and Chef solo can be
used to harden the marketplace images and publish as custom VHDs. Down the
line, once the Jenkins is provisioned, it will be used to automate the ILM.
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