automation-server

The Terraform Pipeline Used to Deploy the Octopus Deploy Server to Azure via Azure Container Group.

🄯 2025 Felsökning/Felsokning. All rights reserved.

TODO:

• Need to implement optional state file storage in an Azure Storage Account
  • Terraform state is only being maintained via files generated from the process and stored in this root folder (ignored in .gitignore).
    • State will be important for production scenarios.
• Need to investigate using Traefik (replacing NGINX), given they can retrive certificates from Let's Encrypt.
  • This will deprecate the certificate steps; so not a small change.

Cost Implications

Deploying an Octopus Deploy Server via this means costs an average of 3.24SEK/day (or €0.03/day); however, the larget cost implications will come from the SQL Server.

SQL SKU

The SQL SKU can be changed/modified to reduce the costs of the SQL server.

• vCore: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/resource-limits-vcore-single-databases?view=azuresql
• DTU: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/resource-limits-dtu-single-databases?view=azuresql

Building Your Own Octopus Deploy Server in Azure with this Terraform definition

These are the steps required to build your own Octopus Deploy Server in Azure using this pipeline.

Azure Subscription

You will need a subscription in Azure to target the deployments against.

Execution Context

You will need to use a docker container that contains all of the tools (e.g.: az cli, docker, etc.) to perform the deployment. You can also use a GitHub Runner or you own local machine.

At minimum, you will need:

• Terraform 1.10.4
  • Used to run the terraform commands
• az cli (any version)
  • Used to login to Azure and for the file-copy operations
• docker cli (any version)
  • Used to pull docker images from docker hub and push them to the ACR (Azure Container Registry)
• openssl
  • Used to create a certificate request - and then used to create a self-signed certificate, based on the certificate request.

Docker Container

I provide worker-tools docker containers that can used for this scenario.

To use the container that I publish, run .\Load-WorkerToolsContainer.ps1 in PowerShell from this repository's root folder.

This is a screenshot showing the process.

Terraform Process

TFVars Files

You will need to create a tfvars file that contains values for all of the variables.

Terraform Init

You will need to run terraform init -upgrade to download the providers.

Terraform Plan

To plan the changes, run terraform plan --var-file <your tfvars file here> -out plan.tfplan, or whatever you want to call the out-file.

Terraform Apply

To apply the changes, using the plan created above, run terraform apply "plan.tfplan" and this will immediately start the apply process.

Terraform Destory

To remove all of the changes that terraform applies, first plan the destructive actions terraform plan --var-file <your tfvars file here> -destroy -out plan.destroy.tfplan, and then apply the destructive actions terraform apply "plan.destroy.tfplan".