Create custom images for your virtual infrastructure that instantly follow your security policy
” Enterprise clients prefer to have a “golden” image (an image that fulfills all their organisational requirements) that they can recycle when deploying additional VMs than deploy additional VMs and then run a provisioning script post-deployment,” Microsoft said. Developing and managing your own image pipeline to construct those custom images means running additional facilities and handling extra software application. You get custom-made images that follow your security and management policies for the virtual facilities youre taking benefit of in the cloud, and you dont have to learn tricky image building pipelines and processes.
The cost of AIB is simply the VMs, storage and networking used to construct your images each time; you d need that facilities however you construct images, and AIB is most likely more efficient than a pipeline you build yourself. You can disperse the images you develop with AIB as a shared image through Azure Compute Gallery.
One of the huge advantages of using cloud IaaS is the benefit; you can spin up a VM whenever you need it, scale it, pause it or toss it away. Large organisations desire the VMs they utilize in the cloud to have the security and configuration settings that match their own policies (and maybe pre-install some specific applications theyve licensed or developed), which default gallery images will not do. Running scripts to personalize those default images requires time; if software installation and setup takes 10 minutes, doing that with a script is just too sluggish if you wish to scale out a work on demand.
” Enterprise clients prefer to have a “golden” image (an image that meets all their organisational requirements) that they can recycle when deploying extra VMs than release additional VMs and then run a provisioning script post-deployment,” Microsoft stated. Reusing an image makes scaling out faster and more reliable while keeping you in policy. And when you have the procedure in place to develop images, you can quickly restore them frequently to include OS and application updates.
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Creating and managing your own image pipeline to construct those customized images implies running additional infrastructure and handling additional software application. Azure Image Builder offers you that as a cloud service. You get custom images that follow your security and management policies for the virtual facilities youre benefiting from in the cloud, and you dont have to discover challenging image structure pipelines and procedures.
Select your source image, create a template with the image setup (reusing existing commands, scripts and develop artefacts if you already have an image structure procedure or are pulling them from different places so you do not have to gather them in one place to run the develop) and get an image or VHD that matches your compliance rules.
AIB includes role-based gain access to control so you can select who gets access to images and while it can produce a VNET, public IP and network security group to communicate with the VM that constructs the image. If you have an existing VNET with resources– including setup servers using Ansible, Chef, Puppet, DSC or comparable– you can define that rather and not use a public IP address at all.
Load up your policy configuration.
AIB began as a feature on Azure Kubernetes Service that utilized Hashicorp Packer to build VHD images. Azure also supports using the popular cloud-init technology for structure Linux images from Azure Resource Manager templates, for instance if youre automating constructing an image to run the Azure IoT Edge runtime. “Packer is a bit more advanced than cloud-init (think of it as an incredibly set) and can be utilized to set up IoT Edge on custom-made VM images too,” Microsoft said.
AIB turns that into a service, complete with flexible choices for how you share the images. You begin with Windows or Linux images, from the Azure Marketplace or existing custom images, and include your own personalizations, whether thats configuration options, copying files or installing applications (including rebooting the image if the installation requires that).
Current variations of Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, SLES, Windows and Windows Server have been checked but Microsoft stated it should work with any Linux or Windows image, and if you already have a custom-made image you can use AIB to spot it using Linux commands or Windows Update. The Windows Update Customizer is constructed on the open source community Windows Update Provisioner for Packer.
You can utilize familiar commands like Sysprep (or waagent for Linux images) and copy files to the image from a GitHub report or Azure storage. If youre downloading large files, you might choose to utilize a script and usage wget, curl or Invoke-WebRequest on Windows.
For Windows VMs you can use PowerShell scripts to customise the image. Currently, you can just utilize shell scripts (consisting of any Packer shell provisioner scripts you already have) for customising Linux VMs; when we asked about PowerShell assistance, Microsoft only stated “the team is constantly taking feature requests from consumers.”.
You can build images for specialised VM sizes, including creating images for GPU VMs.
The cost of AIB is simply the VMs, storage and networking utilized to build your images each time; you d require that infrastructure however you construct images, and AIB is probably more efficient than a pipeline you build yourself. Microsoft tells us that IT admins who are used to constructing images for on-premises facilities should not discover AIB difficult. “The only confusion might lie in finding logs for stopped working runs of AIB, which are found in the storage account developed in the IT _ resource group for their image. Clients will likewise require to learn more about how build and release pipelines work since DevOps has particular performance where construct bits are baked in the image to run customizations on it.”.
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You can distribute the images you create with AIB as a shared image through Azure Compute Gallery. That lets you version images and reproduce them into various Azure regions, all set to use for VMs and VM Scale Sets. Additionally, you can develop a managed image in an Azure Storage account and utilize policy to identify who has access. Or you can output a VHD and distribute that any method you desire to: through Azure Storage, by publishing it in the Azure Marketplace, by copying it onto Azure Stack facilities or any way you now share VHDs.
If youre looking for examples of how to take advantage of AIB, you can get Azure Resource Manager samples from this template repo that use specifications you can complete with your own details.
If you desire to make that part of a CI/CD pipeline there are samples for calling AIB from a GitHub Action and distributing the images the workflow constructs. Or you can run the Azure DevOps job that utilizes AIB to inject build artefacts into a VM as part of a DevOps pipeline (although it does not support Windows Restarts so its most hassle-free for Linux VMs since you will need numerous additional steps to use it for Windows VMs). The AIB DevOps task also just supports one in-line script customizer, and it does not yet support Gen2 images.
AIB is likewise beneficial for producing custom images for Azure Virtual Desktop, for patching and image lifecycle management, Microsoft points out.
” Today, a significant portion of AVD session hosts are created using customized images, with the normal client requiring to spot their Golden image when per month with the current feature and security updates. Due to the fact that of this, Azure Image Builder can play an essential function here in providing an effective way for AVD customers to maintain a Golden image without having to by hand use customizations or patch updates.”.
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Image: Microsoft.