Azure Security Center is a good thing to have as part of your Azure resources and it comes in two tiers: Free or Standard. By default it is enabled in your Azure subscription at the free tier and changing that to standard unlocks additional features and comes with some costs . So you’ve upgraded Security Center to standard and you have enabled data collection and you chose the option ‘Use workspace(s) created by Security Center (default)’.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to start playing with Azure Devops and as I’m historically and primarily an infrastructure guy I wondered how Azure Devops can help me with such things as Infrastructure as Code. What I’ll show in this post is how to deploy ARM infrastructure resources such as VMs and vnets using ARM templates and Azure Devops. I’m not going to go into how you can purchase Azure Devops, there are many ways to gain access to it https://azure.

In part one we setup a project in Azure Devops, create an Azure repo, added an ARM template to the repo and created a build pipeline. In this post we’ll create a release pipeline to actually deploy our resources in Azure. Within Azure Devops open our project and select ‘Releases’ and select ‘New Pipeline’ On the next page choose under select template choose ‘Start with an empty job’ By default the stage is called Stage 1 as per the above screenshot, I’ve renamed mine to Deployment

This ARM template will deploy x number of virtual machines (takes the number you need as a parameter), a storage account in the target resource group for boot diagnostics, deploys the VMs in an availability group and deploys x number of data disks per VM. Both the number of data disks (per VM) and size are parameters. It attaches the VMs to an existing vnet/subnet, both of which are parameters. it also sets the Locale to UK on Windows servers using a custom script extension as per https://www.

An ARM template to deploy a basic OMS workspace in Azure. It deploys a workspace and two OMS solutions: Anti-Malware assessment and Updates. Another template for OMS deployment, which is identical to the above, but links the workspace to an existing automation account. Note it does not create the automation account, the automation account must already exist. These templates are over on my Github page