Azure Insights: GitHub actions; Bicep; Key Vault; VMs; Selective Password Hash Synchronization

Microsoft Azure pros discuss GitHub actions, Azure Bicep, Key Vault, VMs and the new Selective Password Hash Synchronization feature.

Using GitHub actions to deploy Terraform

Thomas Thornton explained that Terraform is increasingly popular among Azure users, displacing ARM deployments for certain circumstances.

GitHub actions allow users to create workflows from GitHub repositories, offering a way to have automated workflows like DevOps pipelines. To get started users need to store a Terraform state file remotely and have Azure Service Principal, with credentials saved as secrets. The stored state file is used to map resources and track metadata. He shared a code sample and wrote:

To add this GitHub Action to your repository, within your GitHub Repo – select Actions -> Workflows -> New workflow… Once the Action has been ran, we can review each step.

Getting going with Azure Bicep

Microsoft MVP Tobias Zimmergren shared his thoughts on Azure Bicep. Infrastructure as Code is quite popular right now, but ARM templates can become unwieldy. Bicep offers a domain specific language to abstract complexity. During a deployment, a .bicep case gets converted to an ARM template.