Overview of Setting up CloudOps for Azure

This topic describes the process to setup CloudOps for Azure, which can be used for deploying Elastic Path Commerce on Azure.

A high level workflow overview of CloudOps for Azure

Setup Phases

Preparations

Start by creating a Service Principal. The Service Principal is like a user account that isn’t tied to a person, which nobody will log on to. In other contexts, it might be called a service account.

You will use the Service Principal during the bootstrap process to automatically create the services that are needed in Azure. The Service Principal is also used during scaling events to automatically create and delete virtual machines as needed.

For more details view Preparation tasks

Bootstrap Process

After you create the Service Principal, you can start the bootstrap process. This process runs entirely in a Docker container and creates:

A repository in ACR, Azure Container Registry
AKS, Azure Kubernetes Service, cluster
The services that run inside the AKS cluster

It takes approximately 15-45 minutes to complete, largely depending on how quickly Microsoft can provision the AKS cluster.

For more information, see the view Bootstrap tasks section.

Post-Bootstrap Tasks

With bootstrap completed, log on to the Kubernetes dashboard to check on the state of things running in the AKS cluster.

You can also log on to the AKS cluster at this point. This is required for using kubectl, which is an important tool for managing the state of resources inside the Kubernetes cluster.

Nexus and Jenkins should already be running inside the AKS cluster, which the bootstrap process configures and deploys.

For more information, see the view Post-Bootstrap tasks section.

Build Artifacts

If you log on to the Jenkins instance, you can start a build job to convert ep-commerce source into a deployment package.

Next, convert the deployment package into Docker images. With the Docker images built, you can create and populate the Azure Database for MySQL server.

For more information, see the view Build Artifacts tasks section.

Post Setup of CloudOps for Azure

Finally, with the Docker images ready and the database populated, you can deploy the Elastic Path services inside AKS.