Adventures in Azure: Imperative Deployment of an App Service and Authentication with Azure Active Directory

I am a big fan of deploying Azure resources using an imperative approach.

In this example I wanted to create an App Service that used Azure Active Directory, without having to add any code, e.g. Startup.cs.

I will use both Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI.

This raises a good question, why mix Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI?

I am using Azure CLI for it’s idempotency and PowerShell for it’s programming model, or in simpler terms, Azure CLI just does some things better easier than Azure PowerShell and vice versa.

To get started, I created two PowerShell scripts, Authenticate.ps1, to authenticate Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI, and another, Deploy.ps1, to create all the resources in Azure.

Authenticate.ps1

This Authenticate.ps1 script authenticates the user to Azure using the PowerShell cmdlet Connect-AzAccount and the CLI command az login.

The script in file format can be found at https://github.com/mattruma/MJR052/blob/master/Authenticate.ps1.

Deploy.ps1

This Deploy.ps1 script creates the following Azure resources:

• Resource Group
• Application Service Plan
• Application Service
• Application Insights
• App Registration and Service Principal

The script, in a file format, can be found at https://github.com/mattruma/MJR052/blob/master/Deploy.ps1.

Another great exercise in imperative infrastructure deployment!