Greetings Programs!

Over the last week or so I’ve been working on an Infrastructure as code Azure Hybrid cloud deployment, based on the Azure Spoke and Hub reference topology.

The gateways connecting Azure to the On-Prem datacenter in my case are Cisco Cloud Services Router 1000v (CSR1kv), using day 0 automation to inject a configuration into the Azure Router.

Here’s a link to the Azure Deployment Guide for the CSR1kv, which has some really interesting tidbits. I’ll dive into those in future post.

To actually execute the infrastructure build, I’m using a tool called Terraform.

Terraform does an incredible job of abstracting away all the details you normally have to worry about when provisioning cloud provider infrastructure. It’s a joy to work with. The documentation and examples are easy to follow, and the error messages tell you exactly what you did wrong and where to look.

If that wasn’t cool enough, the Terraform binary is actually built in to the Azure Cloud shell. The net of that is, once you have your deployment files built, you can work with them using just cloudshell, which is super convenient.

That’s it for today. Lot’s of neat stuff in this lab that I’m dying to talk about, can’t wait to share.

Best regards,

-s