Automate Azure cloud infrastructure setup using Ansible and Azure DevOps pipeline | How to integrate Ansible with Azure DevOps | Integrating Ansible with Azure DevOps Pipelines |

Ansible is an open-source configuration management tool that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, and application deployments. Using Ansible you can provision virtual machines, containers, network, and complete cloud infrastructures. 

Automate Azure cloud infrastructure setup using Ansible and Azure pipeline

Integrate Ansible with Azure Cloud

Integrating Ansible with Microsoft Azure allows you to automate and manage your Azure infrastructure using Ansible playbooks and modules. Ansible provides a collection of Azure-specific modules that enable you to provision and configure resources in Azure.

To configure Azure credentials, you need the following information:

• Your Azure subscription ID and tenant ID
• The service principal application ID and secret

Pre-requisites:

• Azure account subscription, click here if you don't have one.
• Azure CLI needs to be installed.
• Service principal to create any resources in Azure cloud using Azure cloud shell or Azure CLI

Login to Azure

az login

Enter Microsoft credentials

Create Azure Service Principal

Run the following commands to create an Azure Service Principal:

az ad sp create-for-rbac --name <service-principal-name> \ 

--role Contributor \ 

--scopes /subscriptions/<subscription_id>

Save the above output in a file as you will not be able retrieve later.

Create an Ansible playbook

Create a simple playbook to create a resource group in Azure. Make sure you modify the name of the resource group and location below.

---

- hosts: localhost

  connection: local

  tasks:

    - name: Creating resource group

      azure_rm_resourcegroup:

        name: "my-rg12"

        location: "eastus"

Create Azure YAML build pipeline:

Login to Azure Devops --> https://dev.azure.com

Select project dashboard.

Go to Pipelines -> New pipeline --> Click on Azure Repos Git or any SCM where you have playbooks stored. Select repo, click on Starter pipeline.

Add below four pipeline variables with value received from service principal creation.

AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID

AZURE_CLIENT_ID

AZURE_SECRET

AZURE_TENANT

Add below tasks:

• Install Ansible on build agent
• Install Ansible rm module on build agent
• Execute Ansible playbook for creating resource group in Azure cloud.

trigger:

- main

pr: none # Disable PR triggers, can be adjusted as needed

pool:

vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

steps:

- script: |

# Install Ansible

pip3 install "ansible==2.9.17"

displayName: 'Install Ansible'

- script: |

# Install Ansible rm module

pip3 install ansible[azure]

displayName: 'Install Ansible rm module'

- script: |

# Run Ansible playbook to create resource group

ansible-playbook create-rg.yml

displayName: 'Run Ansible Playbook'

env:

AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID: $(AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID)

AZURE_CLIENT_ID: $(AZURE_CLIENT_ID)

AZURE_SECRET: $(AZURE_SECRET)

AZURE_TENANT: $(AZURE_TENANT)

Save the pipeline and run it.

Now Login to Azure cloud to see if the resource group have been created.

Watch Steps in YouTube channel: