My work frequently involves using remote, ephemeral, containers to run scripts/code/whatever for DevOps type automation. Typically these containers are running some flavor of Linux. My work also frequently involves designing these automations for Azure and using Terraform for IaC. On occasion though, I find the need to drop out of “declarative” mode and utilize scripted imperative actions to make dynamic changes at run time. I frequently lean on either using the remote-exec provisioner with a null resource -or- if I really need my script to run during the Terraform plan phase, I will use the special external data source.

All that said, this article isn’t really focused on Terraform per se’ or the usage of those methods. Perhaps at some point in the future I will have an opportunity to do some write-ups on the topic of using run-time scripts. Rather, this is much more narrowly focused on how to interact and affect changes in Azure using the ARM API using commonly available tools on most runners like BASH and CURL. (more…)