What is the best way to create a new Windows Azure Hosted service from a running role using a package and configuration that I have stored in blob storage?
I am guessing that I could use a Service Management REST API Create Deployment request, however running a cmdlet from my worker role might be better. Any thoughts? If the cmdlet route is better, bonus points if you can point me in the right direction on how to run them from a worker role.
Not sure what is 'best' here because it depends on what you are trying to do. If you just need to create a hosted service programmatically it would be about the same to create a REST client, upload a cert, and just do it versus using the cmdlets or anything else.
As the creator of the cmdlets, they have a special place in my heart, but I would probably stick to using those for IT admin tasks. They rock for cmd line automation.
That being said, it is not terribly hard to roll your own client, but I typically recommend that you download the Service Managements contracts from csmanage. That way, you have a simple wrapper around this to get going. While it does use WCF, it is not too onerous.
Related
I would like to be able to call Powershell scripts using a REST API. (Please note that I am describing the _opposite_ of calling a REST API from Powershell.) Are there any prebuilt API gateways that support this use case? I've looked at Ocelot, but it currently only acts as a gateway to other REST APIs. Ideally I would simply design my Powershell script functions to follow a defined interface pattern, put the files into a defined directory, and the API gateway would either immediately make those functions available as REST API calls or with minimal configuration.
EDIT: To clarify, I am looking for something self hosted, not cloud based. I haven't found anything yet that is exactly what I need, I may create something myself.
You can try AWS Lambda and API gateway integration.
Here is an example: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/creating-a-powershell-rest-api/
Amazon offer 12 month free tier plan for this.
A couple of options. If you are on Azure you could expose your Powershell Scripts through Azure Automation :
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automation/automation-webhooks
That'd be a lightweight way of having your scripts enabled through a HTTP POST scenario.
You could also combine or mix it with adding API Management in front to support various scenarios (adding GET/PUT/DELETE support e.g.) or even automate or proxy more things. API Management could of course also be automated.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/api-management/
You could also create a folder structure with modules & sub-functions and create a full REST API by using Azure Functions with PowerShell:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-reference-powershell
The latter would also be able to execute in containers & in the supported Azure Function
runtimes.
Is it possible to use AWS KMS and a tool like credstash without the use of EC2 or equivalent or does it rely solely on IAM roles?
I've got a server elsewhere where I am testing some things out and ultimately I will be looking at migrating an app to EC2 etc. to make use of scaling. But for now whilst I'm setting up my deployment pipeline etc. I wondered if it was still possible to make use of KMS on my non-aws provisioned server?
The only possible way I can think of is by installing the AWS CLI tools on the server in question. Does this sounds like the right approach?
What #Viccari said is correct (in the comments). In terms of what you want to do (store passwords), the AWS Parameter Store would be a good fit for you. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/systems-manager-paramstore.html for more information. The guide explicitly calls out your use-case:
Parameter Store offers the following benefits and features.
Use a secure, scalable, hosted secrets management service (No servers to manage).
In the end, if you end up using Parameter Store or KMS, you will need some sort of credentials stored somewhere to grab an AWS STS token to use to call the underlying AWS services. If working outside of AWS EC2, you will need the AWS Access Key and AWS Secret Key from an IAM user. If you are in EC2, the IAM instance role will magically provide you the credentials and use that role to call those AWS services. The AWS SDK does this for you behind the scenes.
But, as you state, you don't want to run this in EC2 (to save money, or other reasons). The quickest way to store these credentials is to have them in a un-tracked file (added to your .gitignore) you can source from as environment variables, which your program will then read. This allows you to do local testing, and easily run it in EC2
with zero code changes. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-environment.html for what variables to set. Note that this doc talks about the CLI; the SDK's follow the same behavior.
Has anyone come up with a complete solution to protect and replicate VMs from on-prem (either VMware or HyperV) to Azure using either the REST API or the Powershell module?
I recently completed a POC with ASR and was able to replicate a couple dozen VMs associated with three different applications. I replicated out of VMware and into Azure. I was able to failover and failback successfully.
I did all of the POC work using the GUI (portal.azure.com). Now I have to figure out how to protect ~2000 VMs and there is no way that I am going to do that with the GUI. But the MS documentation has me running in circles.
(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/)
It would be very helpful if any of you can share the sequence of steps to protect and replicate a VM. The MS documentation does not lay out how the various components (fabrics, protection policies, protection containers, protection items, etc.) are related to each other.
I do not need specific syntax. The documentation does a passable job of detailing the syntax. I could use some guidance on the task sequence.
If it helps to understand the bigger picture, my intention is to use a System Center Orchestrator runbook to ingest a CSV list of VMs, parse that out into input for the Azure REST API / Powershell, and then enable protection.
Thanks in advance for any assistance or guidance that you are able to provide.
You can find recovery service API documentation here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/recoveryservices/
When you have one definition put in place(manually from portal), you may also be able to study it from resource.azure.com to see how properties are composited. *not all resource available thru this portal
After that, you should be able to create template for either REST call or Resource Manager, depending on preference.
I am able to create VM from a custom image using Azure resource management sdk for .net. Now, I want to download the RDP file for virtual machine programmatically. I have searched and able to find Rest API for azure 'Classic' deployments which contains an api call to download RDP file but i can't find the same in Rest API for 'ARM' deployment. Also, I can't find any such Method in .net sdk for azure.
Does there any way exist to achieve that? Please guide..
I don't know of a way to get the RDP file, but you can get all the information you need from the deployment itself. On the deployment, you can set outputs for the values you need like the publicIp dns. See this:
https://github.com/bmoore-msft/AzureRM-Samples/blob/master/VMCSEInstallFilePS/azuredeploy.json#L213-215
If your environment is more complex (load balancers, network security groups) you need to account for port numbers, etc.
To authenticate to Azure and use the Azure Resource Manager cmdlets, I currently use the methods outlined here, namely using an Azure Active Directory account, encrypting the password, storing the encrypted string in a text file, and reading that into a credential object when using it in the script.
But I get the sense that maybe I should be using management certificates instead.
There is a documented method to use a publish settings file, but apparently that doesn't work for AzureRm cmdlets, only older cmdlets.
I have seen examples for using Powershell to create an application_id and service principal, and for authenticating a C# app, for instance, but I can't seem to find anything showing how to use management certificates for authentication in a powershell script, to use AzureRm cmdlets.
Maybe the secure string password storage method is the right one. But I don't have a good sense for that.
What do you use?
The best way to do it? It depends what is important to you. Ease of use, security, scripting?
Microsoft Azure Tooling (Visual Studio, Azure Powershell and CLI) lately moved to a more fine-granular, role-based access control approach based on Azure AD. This is currently a pretty good way to do it, since Management certificates allow owners to manage at subscription level and have proven to be rather difficult in environments like Azure Automation.
Refs
https://azure.microsoft.com/de-de/blog/azure-automation-authenticating-to-azure-using-azure-active-directory/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cloud-services-certs-create/#what-are-management-certificates
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cloud_solution_architect/archive/2015/03/17/rbac-and-the-azure-resource-manager.aspx
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/role-based-access-control-configure/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-rbac/#concepts
You should have a look to Service Principal
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-create-service-principal-portal/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-authenticate-service-principal/