New Azure Resource Manager provider

[Richard Harding]

On Fri, 06 Nov 2015, Andrew Wilkins wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> The new ARM APIs are much more flexible, and mean we will no longer have to
> give up the ability to use unit placement in Azure.

Awesome! Uros, we should look at updating the GUI to allow machine view
placement in Azure once this is out. I imagine we'll have to do some
sniffing to tell when Juju is using the newer provider code.

> There is provisional support for running multiple Azure environments in the
> one Juju controller. In the new Azure, resources are grouped under (aptly
> named) Resource Groups. We represent each environment/model as a separate
> resource group; each of these has its own VMs, storage, etc. All machines
> in all environments are connected to a single "internal" virtual network,
> so that machines can communicate with one another and to the controllers.

This is great. It was one of the requests of Azure when their new API came
out that helps us clean up the cloud provider dashboard a bit as folks use
a lot of Juju. Please keep this idea in mind as we work with other
providers if there's any way to group the resources Juju is using in that
provider.

> So with the new provider, you can do:
>     juju add-machine --series=win2012
> ... and it'll just work. No custom image metadata up my sleeve.
> (If you're developing and need to upload Windows agent binaries, look out
> for my next email.)
> 
> Real deployment of a Powershell charm based on
> https://github.com/cloudbase/windows-charms-boilerplate:
>     http://paste.ubuntu.com/13123095/
> 
> The code for the provider is all here:
>     https://github.com/axw/juju/tree/azure-arm/provider/azure
> And there's a wiki page describing some of the details here:
> 
> https://github.com/juju/juju/wiki/Azure-provider-design-implementation-notes

This is AWESOME! It's time to start finding some targets for Windows based
charms out there and getting their software into the store. Stefan, we
should work with Andrew to get some docs on how to build/test out their
Windows charms, probably with some notes from CloudBase who's done some of
this, and open up the range of ISV target we're talking to.

Thanks Andrew, this is all great stuff.

Rick