DevOps and Azure IaC Series: Deploy
Welcome back to our Azure IaC and DevOps series! In our previous article, we delved into the Build phase, highlighting best practices to achieve consistent, repeatable builds. Today, we embark on an exciting journey into the Deploy phase. A streamlined deployment process is vital for ensuring successful and consistent infrastructure deployments. We’ll explore how leveraging powerful tools like Azure Bicep can play a pivotal role in achieving this goal and transforming our deployment strategy.
The Deploy Phase
The Deploy phase for Azure IaC is quite similar to software deployments. Both require a well-defined process to ensure successful and consistent deployments. Here are some key aspects to consider:
Defining an IaC Tool: Just as software deployments rely on well-defined tools and scripts, IaC deployments require a robust IaC tool like Azure Bicep. This ensures that your infrastructure is deployed consistently and accurately.
Environment Definitions and Approvals: Like software, IaC deployments often target multiple environments (e.g., development, staging, production). Each environment needs to be defined clearly, and deployment to each environment should be gated by approval processes to ensure quality and compliance.
Artifact Management: Ensuring that the correct artifacts from the build phase are used in deployments is crucial for maintaining consistency and reliability. This parallels the software deployment process, where binaries and other artifacts must be managed carefully.
Monitoring and Rollbacks: After deployment, monitoring the deployed resources and having rollback mechanisms in place are essential. This is similar to how software deployments are managed to ensure stability and quick recovery in case of issues.
Pipeline Templates
In the deploy phase, leveraging a reusable GitHub workflow (pipeline template) can significantly enhance the efficiency and consistency of deploying Azure IaC Bicep templates. To demonstrate this, I’ve added an example workflow to the repository linked below. This workflow integrates essential steps such as:
Download Build Artifacts: Ensuring that the same artifacts generated during the Build phase are used in the deployment phase. This step guarantees consistency and integrity across environments.
Environment Definitions: Define the environments to which the infrastructure will be deployed. This can include development, staging, production, and other custom environments.
Deployment Steps: Defined script files or inline scripts enable the pipeline to automatically deploy to various Azure scopes, such as tenant, management group, subscription, or resource groups.
Post Deployment Checks: After deployment, run validation scripts or tools to ensure that the deployed resources are functioning as expected. This step is crucial for maintaining the integrity of your infrastructure.
Check out the repository for this series to see how these concepts come to life and integrate them into your workflows.
Click here to view the deploy example GitHub workflow
Conclusion
In this article, we explored the Deploy phase of Azure IaC and DevOps, highlighting the critical steps involved in deploying infrastructure using Azure Bicep. By following best practices and leveraging reusable GitHub workflows, we can streamline our deployment process and ensure consistency across environments. Don’t miss our next post, where we’ll explore centralised pipelines and the crucial role they play in streamlining deployments and enhancing efficiency. Stay tuned!