With a little googling this task isn’t very complex, however, for those wanting to consume this information easily – this post is for you.

There’s a lot of cloud provisioning tools out there; if you’re like me and prefer to leverage your existing knowledge wherever possible you might come to the conclusion that using the same tool to provision your VMs as you do to manage them makes sense. I already know Ansible, why not leverage it to create my infrastructure as well as manage it post-creation.

First, in your Azure account you will want to create a service principal. This is basically an authentication token that Ansible will use to access the Azure API. Using the Azure Active Directory component for identity management, Microsoft has a good how-to article guiding you through creating this service principal. In Azure the terminology gets a little confusing as this technically gets created as an “application”, but really what we’re doing here is creating a service account identity to use with the Azure API via Ansible modules.

Once you’ve got this service principal created, I prefer to create a ~/.azure/credentials file to store the identity information. This keeps the private auth details out of any public Ansible git repositories I may create and share with others. Microsoft publishes another good article on how to install Ansible and how-to create the Ansible credentials file.

I like to use python virtual environments to keep any installed python libraries from overwriting the ones that come with my linux distro (Fedora 29). So here I create a python virtual environment where I can install the Ansible Azure packages:

Now with the Azure dependencies for Ansible installed, and my ~/.azure/credentials file created, I can start writing a playbook to create a new virtual machine. I’ve previously created some virtual networks, security groups, and public IP addresses, etc. so I’m going to reference those in my playbook. If you don’t have these, you can create them in the playbook as well. The Ansible docs guide for Azure gives a good example playbook to do this.

Here’s my playbook:

So with that created, let’s run it:

Alright, that looks to have been successful. Let’s check the Azure Portal:

Nice. It’s showing my VM as created and now running. Let’s test a login:

There we have it! Note, you’ll of course need to make sure your security group allows inbound SSH.