Creating an Azure Virtual Network with Ansible Playbook

Learn how to use Ansible’s Azure modules to automate the creation of a virtual network with subnets and a public IP address in Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Creating an Azure Virtual Network with Ansible Playbook

As organizations continue to adopt cloud technologies, the need for automated infrastructure provisioning and configuration management becomes more important than ever. Ansible, a popular open-source automation tool, has several modules for working with Microsoft Azure Cloud. In this article, we will explore how to use Ansible’s Azure modules to automate the creation of a virtual network with subnets and a public IP address in Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, you will need the following:

An Azure account with the necessary permissions to create virtual networks and subnets.

Ansible is installed on your local machine or server.

Azure modules for Ansible installed.

``bash


ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection



Creating an Azure Virtual Network with Ansible
Let’s start by creating an Ansible playbook to create a virtual network with subnets and a public IP address in Azure.

Links

[azure.azcollection.azure_rm_virtualnetwork](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/azure/azcollection/azure_rm_virtualnetwork_module.html)
[azure.azcollection.azure_rm_subnet](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/azure/azcollection/azure_rm_subnet_module.html)
[azure.azcollection.azure_rm_publicipaddress](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/azure/azcollection/azure_rm_publicipaddress_module.html)

Code

1. Define Variables First.
We need to define the variables that will be used throughout the playbook. Open a new file and add the following code:

`yaml


---
name: Azure Virtual Network
  hosts: all
  vars:
    resource_group_name: "aznetwork-rg"
    location: westeurope
    tags:
      environment: dev
      department: infrastructure
    network:
      name: "aznetwork-vnet"
      address: "10.210.0.0/16"
      subnets:
        - name: "aznetwork-vnet-frontend"
          address: "10.210.1.0/24"
        - name: "aznetwork-vnet-backend"
          address: "10.210.2.0/24"
      publicip:
        name: "aznetwork-public-ip"
        domain: aznetwork-labs



In this code, we define the following variables:

resource_group_name: The name of the resource group where the virtual network will be created.
location: The Azure region where the resource group will be created.
tags: Custom tags to be added to the virtual network.
network: The details of the virtual network, including its name, address space, and subnets.
publicip: The details of the public IP address.

2. Create Virtual Network Next.

We will use the azure_rm_virtualnetwork module to create the virtual network. Add the following task to the playbook:

``yaml

name: VNet - Create virtual network

azure.azcollection.azure_rm_virtualnetwork:

resource_group: "{{ resource_group_name }}"

name: "{{ network.name }}"

address_prefixes:

- "{{ network.address }}"

tags:

environment: "{{ tags.envi