Recently, I had to build a solution where Docker container were appropriate. The idea behind the container is that once there are built you just have to run it. While it's true, my journey was not exactly that, nothing dramatic, only few gotchas that I will explain while sharing my journey.
The Goal
The solution is classic, and this post will focus on a single Virtual Machine (VM). The Linux VM needs a container that automatically runs when the VM starts. Some files first download from a secure location (Azure blob storage) then passed to the container. The solution is deployed using Azure resources manager (ARM). For the simplicity, I will use Nginx container but the same principle applies to any container. Here is the diagram of the solution.
The Solution
I decided to use
Azure CLI to deploy since this will be also the command-line used inside the Linux VM, but Azure PowerShell could do the same. We will be deploying an ARM template containing a Linux VM, and two VM-Extension:
DockerExtension and
CustomScriptForLinux. Once the VM is provisioned, a bash script will be downloaded by CustomScriptForLinux extension from the secure Azure blob storage
myprojectsafe, then executed.
