Create resource groups in Microsoft Azure using Terraform

Creating resources

Now that we’ve got a Terraform command-line and given it the credentials it needs to provision resources in our Cloud, we can start provisioning.

Keeping it unique

When running these kind of tutorials, I find it helpful to keep all the resources unique. That can either be done by appending a unique name, or using a short random string.

This resource creates a random string, which can be accessed using ${random_string.unique_key.result}.

resource "random_string" "unique_key" {
  length = 8
  special = false
}

We only want to use this random_string if the user hasn’t passed a variable, either using the -var command line option, a TF_VAR_ environment variable or .tfvars. We can detect that based on the value and derive a local variable:

locals {
  # use a unique ID for all resources based on a random string unless one is specified
  unique_append = "${ var.unique_id == "" ? "-${random_string.unique_key.result}" : "-${var.unique_id}"}"
}

Terraform resource group

Having generated that local.unique_append we can use it in resources names to keep them unique. Even if this module is re-run in the same account, the resource names should be different enough to avoid a collision.

resource "azurerm_resource_group" "rg" {
  name     = "rg${local.unique_append}"
  location = "${var.region}"
}

Filtering in the console

By selecting a unique name, we can easily filter the Azure web console ‘Resource’ view to show only those resources.

Open-source

All the code for these tutorials is available as part of DevOps-Workstream. The segments from this tutorial specifically make up terraform/tutorial/03-azure-resource-group-with-unique-default here on GitHub.

If you’d like to see all the previous and future installments of this tutorial, they’re available under the remprov tag.

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