Overview - Terraform and Azure PaaS/Serverless

Welcome to this Integration Playbook article about using Terraform with Azure PaaS and Serverless solutions. In this article I will attempt to walk you through the processes in the development lifecycle covering local development and CI/CD processes to show how an application can be built in a reliable and repeatable way.

Getting this right is very important if you want to be successful because a reliable and repeatable process will mean that you can be very agile and aggressive with your rate of change. Implementing new features in your solution with a quick time to market because you know you can build and deploy a solution with confidence.

In the various sections of this article I will talk through in detail a real world example of a solution showing some of the techniques you might need to use and discuss some of the key decisions and discussion points on the journey.

Solution Overview

As we walk through the process of implementing the development process I think it will be useful for the reader to have a basic understanding of the solution I am trying to implement. I dont need to go into too much detail but basically a couple of messages are received from an external party via an API call to our APIM instance. The APIM sits in front of Azure Functions which is a proxy to the functions. The functions use storage and App Insights for diagnostics and sends business messages to queues. The queues are processed by Logic Apps which use SQL Azure DB, Outlook, Teams and Twilio to process the business logic.

The below picture gives you an overview of the solution.

Article Sections

As you work through this article you will see sections and pages in the left hand menu.

• For info on the environments used in this article click here
• For info on how to use Terraform with Serverless on your local developer machine, click here
• For info on how to implement an AzureDevOps build pipeline that uses Terraform, click here
• [Coming soon] - Azure DevOps Release Pipeline