Supporting a new ARM Resource

This set of guided exercises shows the different steps required to design new ARM resources that can be consumed in Farmer. This tutorial will show you the steps to take create a resource that can hook into the Farmer pipeline, by adding support to Farmer for the ContainerRegistry Azure resource. This will involve:

  • Defining an type that implements IArmResource that maps directly to the ARM template output.
  • Defining any domain types required to capture details on the resource.
  • Defining a type that implements IBuilder and an associated computation expression that will be easier for users to consume than an F# record.

This will end up allowing us to define a resource that looks like this:

let myRegistry = containerRegistry {
    name "devonRegistry"
    sku ContainerRegistrySku.Basic
    enable_admin_user
}

let deployment = arm {
    location Location.WestCentralUS
    add_resource myRegistry
}

which generates JSON looking something like this:

{
  "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2019-04-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",
  "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
  "outputs": {},
  "parameters": {},
  "resources": [
    {
      "apiVersion": "2019-05-01",
      "location": "westcentralus",
      "name": "my-registry",
      "properties": {
        "adminUserEnabled": true
      },
      "sku": {
        "name": "Basic"
      },
      "type": "Microsoft.ContainerRegistry/registries"
    }
  ]
}

Useful terminology

  • Resource: A resource is a single Azure service provided by ARM; in Farmer these resource models are created by implementing the IArmResource interface.
  • Template: Represents an ARM template with parameters, outputs and zero, one or many resources.
  • Location: An Azure Region where a service exists.
  • Deployment: Represents the deployment of an ARM template to a specific Location and Resource Group name.
  • Builder: In Farmer, an IBuilder provides the capability of creating a smart type that helps model a resource or a collection of resources into associated IArmResource objects required for constructing the ARM template. For example, Farmer’s WebApp builder provides a logical abstraction on top of several ARM resources: Web App, Server Farm and Application Insights.

Requirements

  • Minimum version is 2.5.0 of Azure CLI
  • Azure account to test against