Everyone who works in IT and software development has encountered this problem before. You got this legacy project and it went down yesterday. Now it’s your task to read the documentation and get it live again. Guess what? you followed all the steps but still the application is not working. Is the documentation up to date? Was there a firewall setting that’s needs to be opened up? Wait the documentation said it uses MongoDB but didn’t we work on Prisma up until now? I guess everyone who has been in this position knows what an absolute nightmare it can be to live through this.

You told yourself, I will do better and I will never let a project be out of date with it’s documentation right? We all know that’s not going happen. So how can we solve this? There is only one way, to automate the complete setup from Git repository to infrastructure to configuration and deployment.

Luckily for us, this is now possibly through a variety of tools across the development spectrum. In this workshop we will make use of one of the most popular tolls called Terraform. It allows us to write the infrastructure as code and run it to spin up our environment in Azure.

In this workshop we will cover:

1. Setting up Terraform.
2. Dockerizing our application.
3. Deploying it to an Azure container registry via GitHub actions.
4. Pushing the code within our GitHub actions
5. Making sure all environment variables are set and stored securely via Azure key vault

By making sure that we keep everything in code to deploy and configure it, we can make sure that the application is always possible to get back up within an hour. This will greatly improve you psyche and sanity as developer/infrastructure/stakeholder/client.

This workshop expects attendees to have access to:
1. Internet
2. Github
3. Azure

It will take about 2 hours and will show a step by step introduction both on the theory and practical side on how to get started automating and deploying websites with Terraform to an Azure cloud environment. We will dockerize a React application and host it on Azure. However if you are using something else than React or Azure, this talk will still be beneficial as Terraform supports almost any major cloud environment.

It’s aimed at developers and infra employees with at least some cloud exposure. GitHub actions and Docker knowledge is preferred but not a requisite.