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Alexey Melezhik
Alexey Melezhik

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Managing Azure infrastructure using Sparrow6 and Perl6

In my @work I do a lot of scripting that allow me to automate creation and managing various Azure resources.

Sparrow6 - Perl6 automation framework has a lot of ready plugins to get job done.
It supports both Windows and Linux operation systems.

Install Sparrow6

We will use Sparrow6 and Tomtit as automation frameworks

zef install Sparrow6 Tomtit

Setup Repository

Sparrow6 public repository has all the plugins we need:

export SP6_REPO=http://repo.westus.cloudapp.azure.com

Login to Azure

Let's create first scenario that login to Azure using app registration credentials:

tom --edit azure-login:


task-run "login to azure", "azure-login", %(
    tenant    => config()<azure><tenant>, # Azure Tenant ID
    app_reg   => config()<azure><app-reg>, # Application registration URL
    password  => config()<azure><password>, # Password ( AKA client secret )
    subs      => config()<azure><subscription> # Subscription ( name or id )
)
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Configuration file

We're going to keep all the configuration data inside Tomtit environment:

tom --env-set dev

%(
    azure => %(

        tenant => "ad777dcc-bf12-4234-b41c-33b355cb1a52",

        subscription => "Smart Species",

        app-reg => "https://birds.azure.zoo.org",
        password => "Black Crow"
   )
)
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tom --env-set dev

Run scenario

Let's run our very first scenario:

tom azure-login

Now when we've successfully logged to Azure we could manage resources. Following are just some examples.

Azure Keyvault

azure-kv-secrets-check plugin allows to retrieve a list of secrest from Azure keyvault and optionally check if they exists there.

tom --edit check-secrets

task-run "check secrets", "azure-kv-secrets-check", %(
    name => "hidden-stash",
    exists => (
      "bank-account",
      "home-PC",
      "credit-card" # I don't use that staff
    )

)
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Digging deeper

Sparrow6 provides you with some plugins to automate interaction with Azure.

To browse existing ones go to Sparrow plugins GitHub project or use command line interface:

s6 --index-update
s6 --search azure
s6 --plg-install azure-kv-secrets-check
s6 --plg-man azure-kv-secrets-check
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I've been constantly adding new plugins and try to support both Windows and Linux systems. Many of plugins require just a azure command line client.


Thank you for reading.

Comments and feedback are welcome.

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