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Azure Bootstrap

The purpose of this document is to take you step by step through the process of bootstrapping a new Azure environment. This is only intended for cases where we are setting up the Azure environment from scratch.

Naming Conventions​

Before starting this process, decide on a naming convention for your organization. For instance, if you are setting up a new organization for "spacecats", you will be creating resource groups like rg-spacecats-prod-eastus, rg-spacecats-dev-eastus, etc.

Create a Service Principal​

First, you will need to create a service principal that will be used to authenticate with Azure. This service principal should have the Owner role on the subscription.

az ad sp create-for-rbac --name "sp-spacecats-terraform" --role "Owner" --scopes "/subscriptions/<subscription-id>"

Save the output of this command, as you will need it to configure Terraform.

Configure Terraform Backend​

Next, you will need to configure a backend for Terraform to store its state. We recommend using an Azure Storage Account for this.

terraform {
  backend "azurerm" {
    resource_group_name  = "rg-terraform-state"
    storage_account_name = "stterraformstate"
    container_name       = "tfstate"
    key                  = "spacecats.tfstate"
  }
}

You will need to create the resource group, storage account, and container before you can initialize Terraform.

Configure Terraform Provider​

Now, you can configure the Terraform provider for Azure. You will need to use the credentials for the service principal you created earlier.

provider "azurerm" {
  features {}

  subscription_id = "<subscription-id>"
  client_id       = "<client-id>"
  client_secret   = "<client-secret>"
  tenant_id       = "<tenant-id>"
}

Next Steps​

Once you have bootstrapped your Azure environment, you can start deploying resources. We recommend using the enterprise-scale landing zone architecture as a starting point. See the Azure Enterprise-Scale Landing Zone document for more information.