Edge Infrastructure QuickStart Template For Scaling (Preview)

----- Accelerate, Automate, and Simplify the IaC setup using your familiar tools

Overview

This Quick-Start template simplifies your Infrastructure as Code journey with Azure edge products throughout their lifecycle. It includes a few Terraform modules (AKS Arc, Azure Stack HCI, Arc Site Manager and Arc extensions), a scalable hands-on repository structure and the automation tools to streamline the setup of the infrastructure configurations for production scaling.

What You'll Get

By using this template, you can get all of the followings inside a single PR under your GitHub account

a scalable and extendible repository structure following the DevOps best practice

│
├───.azure
│   │   backendTemplate.tf              // Backend storage account config file
│   │
│   └───hooks
│           pre-commit                  // Git hook to generate deployment workflow and set backend
│
├───.github
│   └───workflows
│           site-cd-workflow.yml        // Set up CD pipeline
|           terraform-plan.yml
│
├───dev                                 // The first stage to deploy
│   └───sample
│           backend.tf
│           main.tf                     // Main configuration file for the site
│           provider.tf
│           terraform.tf
│           variables.tf
│
├───modules
│   ├───base                            // Base module of all sites
│   │       main.tf
│   │       variables.tf
│   │
│   ├───hci                             // Module to manage HCI clusters
│   │
│   ├───hci-extensions                  // Module to manage HCI extensions                                                                     
│   ├───hci-provisioners                // Module to connect servers to Arc
│   │───aks-arc                         // Module to manage AKS Arc clusters
│   └───hci-vm                          // Module to manage HCI VMs
│   └───site-manager                    // Module to manage site-manager
│
├───prod                                // prod stage sites are deployed after qa stage
│   │
│   └───prod1
│
└───qa                                  // qa stage sites are deployed after dev stage
    │
    └───qa1

Base module contains the global variables across all sites. Each stage and each site folder contains the local variables specific to the stage/site. Local settings can override the global settings.

organized variables with the prefilled values to boost your initial setup

Variable Type	Description	Example	Where to set value	Override Priority
Global Variables	The values of the global variables typically are consistent across the whole fleet but specific for one product	`domain_fqdn` in HCI	Set in `modules/base/<product>.global.tf`. Add default value for variables.	low
Site specific variables	The values of these variables are unique in each site	`starting_address`	These variables must be set in the site `main.tf` file under each site folder	high
Pass through variables	The values of these variables are inherited from GitHub secrets	`subscription_id`	`modules/base/<product>.misc.tf`
Reference variables	These variables are shared by 2 or more products	`location`	Its definition can be found in `variables.<product>.*.tf` if its link is `ref/<product>/<variable_name>`

a customizable CD pipeline with the automations.

Is This Right for You?

Yes if you want to:

Create an initial site containing AKS Arc, HCI23H2 along with Arc extensions using Terraform
If you have manually created a PoC site and wish to convert the PoC site settings into Terraform code.
Replicate the settings from the above site multiple times
Integrate the above settings with CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions
Automate all of the above scenarios

No if you want to:

Create single AKS Arc or HCI instance using Terraform. Although this template contains the Terraform module for each of them, we are still waiting to officially publish them into public Terraform registry. You are welcome to use this repository for testing and exploration. For production usage, please contact [email protected] for each module's status.
Use any other IaC tool such as Bicep or ARM to provision your Azure resources. We are working on our roadmap. Please stay tuned for future releases.

Supported scenarios

flowchart LR;
    A[Fork QuickStart Repo] --> B["`Finish setup 
    in Getting-Started`"];
    B --> F[Uncomment sample code];
    F --> G["`Input values 
    for your first site`"];
    G --> J["`Move shared 
    paramteres to global`"];
    J --> K(["`Scale more sites
    by sample module`"]);
    K --> L[Get scaled sites];

Supported Azure edge resource types

Getting started

This repository implements AD preparation and Arc connection. Follow the instructions below to set up the rest of the components.

Steps: Getting-Started

Scenario 1: Create your first site from scratch using quick-start template, then scale more sites

Create your first site from scratch using quick-start template

Overview: Ready to deploy your first with AKS Arc on HCI23H2 along with Arc extensions? It's the right place for you. This scenario provides a quick and efficient way to establish a new site with edge resources with a predefined infrastructure template.

Steps: Create your first site

Expected outcome:

A PR containing Terraform code set up for AKS Arc, HCI, Arc extensions under a single resource group
A PR containing a pre-defined CI/CD pipeline with the 3 stages: Dev, QA, Prod
Provisioning action will happen in your side (merge the PR to main)

Scale more sites

Overview: Configure scaling settings based on the parameters defined in the previous steps.

Steps:

Create site secrets in the key vault.
- <site>-localAdminUser: The admin user name of HCI hosts.
- <site>-localAdminPassword: The admin user password of HCI hosts.
- <site>-deploymentUserPassword: The password of deployment user which will be created during HCI deployment.
Copy and paste the first site to the new site.
Edit parameters for the new site in main.tf

Enable opt-in features for all sites

Any change merged into main branch will trigger the update pipeline. If the change fails in early stages, the deployment will be blocked so that this failure will not affect the production sites.

Following tutorials help you to turn on opt-in features:

Advanced topics

Ask for support

Open issue or contact [email protected] for any issue or support

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.

Disclaimer

'Preview Terms'. This repository (the "Preview") is subject to the Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews. Unless otherwise noted, Customer should not use the Preview to process Personal Data or other Data that is subject to legal or regulatory compliance requirements.

'Confidentiality'.The Preview and any associated materials or documentation are confidential information and subject to obligations in your Non-Disclosure Agreement with Microsoft.

This repository is provided "as-is" without any warranties or support. Use at your own risk. Always test in a non-production environment before deploying to production.

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit Microsoft opensource.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.

Trademarks

This project may contain trademarks or logos for projects, products, or services. Authorized use of Microsoft trademarks or logos is subject to and must follow Microsoft's Trademark & Brand Guidelines. Use of Microsoft trademarks or logos in modified versions of this project must not cause confusion or imply Microsoft sponsorship. Any use of third-party trademarks or logos are subject to those third-party's policies.