Microsoft Azure¶

Install Python and Azure SDK for Python¶

The cluster creation tool uses Python and the Python Azure library to create a CoreOS cluster. If you haven’t already, install these on your development machine:

$ brew install python
$ sudo pip install azure pyyaml

Generate Certificates¶

The azure-coreos-cluster creation tool uses the Azure management REST API to create the CoreOS cluster which uses a management certificate to authenticate.

If you don’t have a management certificate already configured, the script generate-mgmt-cert.sh can create this certificate for you. Otherwise, you can skip to the next section.

If you need to create a certificate, edit cert.conf in contrib/azure with your company’s details and then run:

$ ./generate-mgmt-cert.sh

Upload Management Cert¶

If you haven’t uploaded your management certificate to Azure (azure-cert.cer if you used the script in the previous section), do that now using the management certificates tab of the Azure portal’s Settings.

Also copy the Azure subscription id from this table and save it for the cluster creation script below.

Create CoreOS Cluster¶

With the management certificate and cloud config in place, we are ready to create our cluster.

• Create a container called vhds within a storage account in the same region as your cluster using the Azure portal. Note the URL of the container for the cluster creation script below.
• Choose a cloud service name for your Deis cluster for the script below. The script will automatically create this cloud service for you.
• Create an affinity group if you don’t already have one. Supply it in quotes with the --affinity-group parameter. Although using an affinity group is not mandatory, it is highly recommended since it tells the Azure fabric to place all VMs in the cluster physically close to each other, reducing inter-node latency by a great deal. If you don’t want to use affinity groups, specify a region for Azure to use with a --location parameter. The default is "West US". If you specify both parameters, location will be ignored. Please note that the script will not create an affinity group by itself; it expects the affinity group exists.

This script calls the ./create-azure-user-data script which takes the stock cluster instance config in ../coreos/user-data.example, customizes it for Azure, and inserts a unique cluster discovery endpoint. It will then use the newly created CoreOS config on the newly provisioned cluster.

With that, let’s run the azure-coreos-cluster script which will create the CoreOS cluster. Fill in the bracketed values with the values for your deployment you created above.

$ ./azure-coreos-cluster [cloud service name]
     --subscription [subscription id]
     --azure-cert azure-cert.pem
     --num-nodes 3
     --affinity-group [affinity group name]
     --vm-size Large
     --pip
     --deis
     --blob-container-url https://[blob container].blob.core.windows.net/vhds/
     --data-disk
     --custom-data azure-user-data

This script will by default provision a 3-node cluster, but you can increase this with the --num-nodes parameter. Likewise, you can increase the VM size using --vm-size. It is not recommended that you use smaller than Large (A3) sized instances.

A Deis cluster must have 3 or more nodes. See Cluster size for more details.

Configure DNS¶

See Configure DNS for more information on properly setting up your DNS records with Deis.

Install Deis Platform¶

Now that you’ve finished provisioning a cluster, please refer to Install the Deis Platform to start installing the platform.