Querying for Azure Regional Pairs

Larry Claman — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 17:17:25 +0000

A teammate recently posted a question on our Team's channel, asking how to programmatically query to find out an Azure Region's pair. Easy I thought - except it turns out, this isn't exposed in the standard PowerShell commands, nor in the Azure CLI.

The PowerShell command Get-AzLocation only returns the Location, DisplayName, and Providers:

PS C:\> Get-AzLocation|ft

Location           DisplayName          Providers
--------           -----------          ---------
eastasia           East Asia            {Microsoft.Media, Microsoft.HDInsight, Microsoft.SqlVirtualMachine, Microsoft.DevOps...}
southeastasia      Southeast Asia       {Microsoft.Media, Microsoft.HDInsight, Microsoft.DataShare, Microsoft.SqlVirtualMachine...}
centralus          Central US           {Microsoft.Media, Microsoft.HDInsight, Microsoft.SqlVirtualMachine, Microsoft.DevOps...}
eastus             East US              {Microsoft.Media, Microsoft.HDInsight, Microsoft.DataShare, Microsoft.SqlVirtualMachine...}
[snip]

Meanwhile, the Azure CLI returns more info, but not the pair:

PS C:\> az account list-locations
DisplayName           Latitude    Longitude    Name
--------------------  ----------  -----------  ------------------
East Asia             22.267      114.188      eastasia
Southeast Asia        1.283       103.833      southeastasia
Central US            41.5908     -93.6208     centralus
East US               37.3719     -79.8164     eastus
East US 2             36.6681     -78.3889     eastus2
West US               37.783      -122.417     westus
[snip]

All hope is not lost! You can find the region's pair, but you need to query the Azure REST api directly, as documented at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/resources/Subscriptions/ListLocations. In the past, you'd need to fire up your favorite REST client (eg, armclient, Vscode + rest client extension, Postman, etc), but in exploring this, I learned an easier way: You can now make Azure REST calls directly from the CLI! Here's what that looks like: (Replace {yoursubid} with your specific subscription id)

az rest --method GET --uri https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{yoursubid}/locations?api-version=2020-01-01 --output json
{
  "value": [
    {
      "displayName": "East US",
      "id": "/subscriptions/{yoursubid}/locations/eastus",
      "metadata": {
        "geographyGroup": "US",
        "latitude": "37.3719",
        "longitude": "-79.8164",
        "pairedRegion": [
          {
            "id": "/subscriptions/{yoursubid}/locations/westus",
            "name": "westus"
          }
        ],
        "physicalLocation": "Virginia",
        "regionCategory": "Recommended",
        "regionType": "Physical"
      },
      "name": "eastus",
      "regionalDisplayName": "(US) East US"
    },
[snip]

What's really cool is you can use the CLI's built-in jmespath query engine to filter and massage the results, eg: (Column1 is the region, and Column2 is the pair)

az rest --method GET --uri https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{yoursubid}/locations?api-version=2020-01-01 --output table --query 'value[].[name,metadata.pairedRegion[].name]'

Column1              Column2
-------------------  ----------------------
eastus               ['westus']
eastus2              ['centralus']
southcentralus       ['northcentralus']
westus2              ['westcentralus']
australiaeast        ['australiasoutheast']
[snip]

(I'm still working on my jmespath ninja skills, so there's still a little cleanup to be done on this table, but it gets the point across.)

Trigger Azure DevOps Build pipeline from Docker image update

Larry Claman — Sat, 18 Apr 2020 00:52:37 +0000

Originally published at Larry Claman's Blog

How to trigger a build?

I was recently asked how to trigger a classic (gui) Azure DevOps build pipeline when a Docker base image updates. You might want to do this, for example, if your build pipeline includes unit, functional, or security tests.

My immediate answer was "you can't." However, after a little investigation and a little hacking, I was able to prototype a solution using the automated trigger & build feature of Azure Container Registry (ACR). The hint for how to do this was buried in the Q&A on documentation page, where it's suggested to use a dummy image to trigger the AzDo pipeline. Here's a walkthrough of how I did this:

Sample Repo & Pipeline

As a sample repo, I used the canonical Azure voting app, but I simplified it a bit to suit my needs. My Dockerfile is pretty simple; my goal is for the build pipeline to run whenever the base python:3.6-slim image is updated on Dockerhub.

Step 1: Create a dummy base image and task in ACR

As I mentioned above, I'm going to build a dummy base image using ACR, and then use a webhook when this image updates to trigger my Azure DevOps pipeline.

First, I'll need to follow the instructions here to create a dummy base image and a task to update it when its reference base updates on Dockerhub.

Dummy Dockerfile for base image:

FROM python:3.6-slim

To start, build the base image in ACR:

ACR_NAME=larrymsvoting
REPO="https://larrydevopstest@dev.azure.com/larrydevopstest/AzureVotingApp/_git/AzureVotingApp"
DOCKER_FILE="azure-vote/Dockerfile-pythonbase"

az acr build --registry $ACR_NAME -t baseimages/python-3.6-slim-base \
    --file $DOCKER_FILE $REPO

Step 2: Create a task

az acr task create \
    --registry $ACR_NAME \
    --name taskpythonbase \
    -t baseimages/python-3.6-slim-base:{{.Run.ID}} \
    --arg REGISTRY_NAME=$ACR_NAME.azurecr.io \
    --context $REPO \
    --file Dockerfile-pythonbase \
    --commit-trigger-enabled false \
    -o table

Assuming it runs successfully, you'll see output like:

NAME            PLATFORM    STATUS    SOURCE REPOSITORY                                                                         TRIGGERS
--------------  ----------  --------  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  ----------
taskpythonbase  linux       Enabled   https://larrydevopstest@dev.azure.com/larrydevopstest/AzureVotingApp/_git/AzureVotingApp  BASE_IMAGE

Step 3: Logic App

Now comes the fun part: getting the base image update to trigger a build in Azure DevOps. We'll start by creating a logic app.
In the portal, create a logic app and give it a relevant name, eg 'pythonbasetrigger'. In the Logic Apps Designer pane, use "When an HTTP Request is Received" as the trigger.

Add a new step, then type 'Azure DevOps' in the search field, then choose 'Queue a new build' as the action. After authenticating, choose the account name, project name, and build id (eg, pipleline). Once it's saved, it should like like:

You can test the logic app by pressing 'Run', which should kick off an Azure DevOps pipeline build.

Finally, in your logic apps's first step 'When an HTTP request is received', find the post URL and copy it, as it will be needed for the next step.

Step 4: ACR webhook

Next, we'll create an ACR webhook which fires whenever the base image updates.

URI=<webhook post url from prior step>

az acr webhook create -n pythonbasehook -r $ACR_NAME \
    --scope baseimages/python-3.6-slim-base \
    --actions push --uri $URI

Step 5: Enjoy!

We've done it! We now have a set up a set of integrations that does the following:

Step 6: Test

Since the Dockerhub base image is only going to be updated periodically, you can test your integration by manually running a build in ACR:

az acr build --registry $ACR_NAME -t baseimages/python-3.6-slim-base \
    --file $DOCKER_FILE $REPO

If all is working, this should trigger a build in Azure DevOps.

Final Thoughts

An alternative to using a webhook would be to use an Event Grid to trigger the Logic App. This is slightly more work to set up, but it might better if you have a number of different pipelines that want to receive notifications when a base image updates. With a webhook, you'd need to set up a trigger for each and every one of them. Eventgrid, having a pubsub architecture, would fan-out one:many more effectively than webhooks.

DEV Community: Larry Claman