Using the Pure Storage Cloud Block Store Terraform Provider for Azure

Mar 9, 2021 Terraform Cloud Block Store Azure

Share on:

Im excited to announce the second release of the Pure Storage Cloud Block Store (CBS) Terraform Provider. This release includes support for Cloud Block Store on Azure! Let’s dive in and take a look.

Table of Contents

Overview

If you are not familiar with the Pure Cloud Block Store, it is a purpose build block storage system that currently sits in AWS and Azure. There are many benefits and use cases you can find out here.

Deployments of Cloud Block Store in Azure are done through an template in the Marketplace. We have had customers ask for better ways to streamline the deployment and the Terraform Provider was introduced. With the Terraform Provider a CBS instance on Azure can be provisioned in ~15 minutes!

Pre-Requisites

Azure CLI

This is used to authenticate to Azure to deploy the VM via Terraform.

Hashicorp Terraform

This is used to automate the provisioning using a Terraform .TF file.

Microsoft Azure Account

This is the infrastructure to run the Azure virtual machines.

Authentication Setup

Unlike with other Terraform providers where you specify login credentials in the manifest, Azure is a bit different. There are 4 options and the easiest is to authenticate using Azure CLI

To login just run the below command. It will open a web browser and you’ll authenticate.

1az login

Cloud Block Store Deployment Setup

A link to the Cloud Block Store Deployment and Configuration Guide for Azure can be found here

Before CBS can be provisioned there is first a set of Azure pre-requisities that need to be configured.

Azure Active Directory Premium 2 License (Mandatory)
- This is required for JIT
Enable Just-in-Time (Mandatory)
- This is required for support access and NDU
Reserve Instances (Strongly Recommended)
- To save on costs
Azure IAM Roles
Network Subnets and Security Groups
Service Endpoint to CosmosDB and KeyVault (Recommended)

These pre-requisities will be used in the terraform deployment in the next section.

Cloud Block Store Terraform Setup

Sample terraform files can be found here

The samples have been variablized for ease of deployment. You should only need to edit the terraform.tfvars file with your parameters.

The documentation has an explanation for the cbs_array_azure resource paramters for a successful deployment.

Cloud Block Store Terraform Deployment

Run terraform init to Setup Provider

1terraform init

Run terraform plan to validate Terraform module and files.

1terraform plan

If successful, its now time to deploy!

1terraform apply --auto-approve

Once the deployment is complete you can run terraform show to see the output and identify the controller IP addresses.

1terraform show

Alternatively, you can log in to Azure and look up your Managed Application for the deployment outputs.

Cloud Block Store Decommission

Currently, destroying the Terraform resource will not deactivate the CBS instance. The instance will have to be deactivated manually once the resource has been destroyed. Please see the deployment guide for information on how to remove CBS instances.

You can find the documentation for Removing Cloud Block Store on Azure here.

Closing

Here we are! We now have the ability to fully automate the provisioning of Cloud Block Store on Azure and AWS. Future posts will expand on use cases on how to use CBS with AWS, Azure, VMware Cloud on AWS and who knows what else!

If you have any additional questions or comments, please leave them below!