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Azure from Debian

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Debian Planet Debian Cloud Azure Planet FSFE Hacking
This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

Around a week ago, I started to play with programmatically controlling Azure. I needed to create and destroy a bunch of VMs over and over again, and this seemed like something I would want to automate once instead of doing manually and repeatedly. I started to look into the azure-sdk-for-python and mentioned that I wanted to look into this in #debian-python. ardumont from Software Heritage noticed me, and was planning to package azure-storage-python. We joined forces and started a packaging team for Azure-related software.

I spoke with the upstream developer of the azure-sdk-for-python and he pointed me towards azure-cli. It looked to me that this fit my use case better than the SDK alone, as it had the high level commands I was looking for.

Between me and ardumont, in the space of just under a week, we have now packaged: python-msrest (#838121), python-msrestazure (#838122), python-azure (#838101), python-azure-storage (#838135), python-adal (#838716), python-applicationinsights (#838717) and finally azure-cli (#838708). Some of these packages are still in the NEW queue at the time I’m writing this, but I don’t foresee any issues with these packages entering unstable.

azure-cli, as we have packaged, is the new Python-based CLI for Azure. The Microsoft developers gave it the tagline of “our next generation multi-platform command line experience for Azure”. In the short time I’ve been using it I’ve been very impressed with it.

In order to set it up initially, you have to configure a couple of of defaults using az configure. After that, you need to az login which again is an entirely painless process as long as you have a web browser handy in order to perform the login.

After those two steps, you’re only two commands away from deploying a Debian virtual machine:

az resource group create -n testgroup -l "West US"
az vm create -n testvm -g testgroup --image credativ:Debian:8:latest --authentication-type ssh

This will create a resource group, and then create a VM within that resource group with a user automatically created with your current username and with your SSH public key (~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) automatically installed. Once it returns you the IP address, you can SSH in straight away.

Looking forward to some next steps for Debian on Azure, I’d like to get images built for Azure using vmdebootstrap and I’ll be exploring this in the lead up to, and at, the upcoming vmdebootstrap sprint in Cambridge, UK later in the year (still being organised).

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