If you are testing the capabilities of Azure Stack Technical Preview, you will probably have been deploying virtual machines from the portal. The IaaS capabilities in Azure Stack are great, but what about being able to deploy multi-components applications as a single entity?
Applications can be made up of many parts resources that can include virtual machines, web sites, databases, storage accounts, network security groups, virtual networks and so on. So how do we deploy and manage all of these resources as an application in a single group? : For that we use using declarative templates (as we’ve described in this previous blog post).
A number of Quick Start templates for Azure Stack are already available on GitHub for you to test. These will allow you to deploy a Windows VM, virtual network, Linux VM, Active Directory Domain controller, a SharePoint farm, etc. using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. We urge you to go check out what is available as the list above just touches on a few of the templates you can download.
The goal of this blog post if to introduce you to a couple of videos we have created that walk you through how to add these templates to your Azure Stack TP1 labs.
The first video, Deploy JSON templates video, walks you through how to deploy the templates using one of four methods:
- Portal
- PowerShell
- Visual Studio
- CLI
The second video shows how to deploy VM extensions in Azure Stack using the Quick Start templates. It will also walk you through a quick containers demo running on a Linux VM in Azure Stack that you can wow your techie friends with!
We are in the process of also creating videos to show you how to deploy resource providers for SQL Server and Web Apps in Azure Stack, as well as a video on Hybrid capabilities. Please stay tuned for those!
For more information on ARM templates, refer to the Azure Resource Manager Template Walkthrough documentation here.
Kath and Victor