README.md

Terraform-AzureRM

Welcome to the Persistent Systems Ltd terraform repository for Azure resources. We are passionate users of Terraform and we wanted to give back to the community. This respository is in real production use by our clients in real projects.

Our Goals of this Project

Document AzureRM resource usage

To help document how to use azurerm terraform resources. Often you will spend a fair amount of time trying to find a real-world working example of a resource. We hope that this provides some context as to how to string together several azurerm resources into intrastructure.

To ease creation of Production Ready Code

This code is opinionated:

-Items created should have AppInsights and/or Log Analytics attached -Security permissions should be automatic and mandatory. (EG: if an entry point can be http or https, it should only be https). -Consistent naming of resources should be easy.

To not start from scratch on every project

There are some basics that you need on every project. You need a resource group, you probably want some base services: Key-Vault, Cosmos, API management. We don't force much, but you should not be starting with a blank editor window when you want to create a CosmosDB table and its associated infrastructure.

We want to give back

We have created fixes and PRs for some of the Azure Resources we have had issues with, but we derive a lot of benefit of team with many years of terraform experience.

Repository Organzation

There are two major folder structures off of the root folder. The scenarios folder is where we put sample code of how to use the smaller grained modules in the services folders. In the services folder are finer grained services. These generally are a single Azure service with ties into Azure AppInsights and/or Log Analytics.

Versioning

Whenever a breaking change occurs a new version folder is created.
Almost always, the breaking change is the addition of a feature that adds a parameter to the module. All of the versioning happens in the
master branch, so you are not tied to all or northing version upgrades.

You should be able to safely pull the head revision of master and other than bug-fixes, no functionality changes should occur.

Variables

We make a lot of use of passing in variables types of object. This allows us to group common parameters to a function, and allows the caller to re-use outputs of one module in another. It also allows you to declare local variables with groups of parameters and pass them into a function in one shot.

Common Variable Names:

The input variable context is the context in which this new resource will be created. At a minimum the context contains all of the resource group information (Name, Location) that are required on a lot of AzureRM resources. The context variable is often used, and is most easily created by using the resource_group module. It will output a context that will be used by most all of the other functions. The standard context is defined as:

variable "context" {
  type = object({

    application_name    = string
    environment_name    = string
    resource_group_name = string
    location            = string
    location_suffix     = string

  })
}

The input variable service_settings are a collection of settings that vary service to service.

Another common input variable is observability_settings which is a combination of Azure Diagnostics and Log Analyics. Some resources support one or the other and some support both. The Maximal example is:

variable "observability_settings" {
  type = object({

    instrumentation_key = string
    workspace_id        = string
    storage_account     = string 
    retention_in_days   = number
  })
}

Where to Start

We will be creating some blogs and other how to's to help you get started as we realize the leaning curve on this is pretty abrupt. For a starting point look at scenarios 1-HelloWorld..

Test the changes