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Azure Service Operator v2

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•6 min read
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Fizzy

Manage your Azure resources from within your Kubernetes cluster.

Azure Service Operator (ASO) allows you to deploy and maintain a wide variety of Azure Resources using the Kubernetes tooling you already know and use.

Instead of deploying and managing your Azure resources separately from your Kubernetes application, ASO allows you to manage them together, automatically configuring your application as needed. For example, ASO can set up your Redis Cache or PostgreSQL database server and then configure your Kubernetes application to use them.

Project Status

This project is stable. We follow the Kubernetes definition of stable.

Why use Azure Service Operator v2?

  • K8s Native: we provide CRDs and Golang API structures to deploy and manage Azure resources through Kubernetes.

  • Azure Native: our CRDs understand Azure resource lifecycle and model it using K8s garbage collection via ownership references.

  • Cloud Scale: we generate K8s CRDs from Azure Resource Manager schemas to move as fast as Azure.

  • Async Reconciliation: we don’t block on resource creation.

What resources does ASO v2 support?

ASO supports more than 150 different Azure resources, with more added every release. See the full list of supported resources.

Contact us

If you’ve got a question, a problem, a request, or just want to chat, here are two ways to get in touch:

Getting Started

Prerequisites

  1. A Kubernetes cluster (at least version 1.16) created and running. You can check your cluster version with kubectl version. If you want to try it out quickly, spin up a local cluster using Kind.

  2. An Azure Subscription to provision resources into.

  3. An Azure Service Principal for the operator to use, or the Azure CLI to create one. How to create a Service Principal is covered in installation. See the Azure Workload Identity setup for how to use managed identity instead. We recommend using workload identity in production.

Installation

Install cert-manager on the cluster

See cert-manager if you’d like to learn more about the project.

$ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.1/cert-manager.yaml

Check that the cert-manager pods have started successfully before continuing.

$ kubectl get pods -n cert-manager
NAME                                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
cert-manager-5597cff495-lmphj             1/1     Running   0          1m
cert-manager-cainjector-bd5f9c764-gvxm4   1/1     Running   0          1m
cert-manager-webhook-c4b5687dc-x66bj      1/1     Running   0          1m

(Alternatively, you can wait for cert-manager to be ready with cmctl check api --wait=2m - see the cert-manager documentation for more information about cmctl.)

Install the latest v2+ Helm chart

The latest v2+ Helm chart can be found here

$ helm repo add aso2 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Azure/azure-service-operator/main/v2/charts
$ helm upgrade --install aso2 aso2/azure-service-operator \
    --create-namespace \
    --namespace=azureserviceoperator-system \
    --set crdPattern='resources.azure.com/*;containerservice.azure.com/*;keyvault.azure.com/*;managedidentity.azure.com/*;eventhub.azure.com/*'

Note: bash requires the value for crdPattern to be quoted with ' to avoid expansion of the wildcards.

Warning

Make sure to set the crdPattern variable to include the CRDs you are interested in using. You can use --set crdPattern=* to install all the CRDs, but be aware of the limits of the Kubernetes you are running. * is not recommended on AKS Free-tier clusters. See CRD management for more details.

Note

When installing ASO in an AKS cluster, see AKS Best Practices.

Alternatively you can install from the release YAML directly.

Create a Managed Identity or Service Principal

This identity or service principal will be used by ASO to authenticate with Azure. You’ll need this to grant the identity or Service Principal permissions to create resources in your subscription.

Note

We show steps for using a Service Principal below, as it’s easiest to get started with, but recommend using a Managed Identity with Azure Workload Identity for use-cases other than testing.

See Security best practices for the full list of security best practices.

First, set the following environment variables to your Azure Tenant ID and Subscription ID with your values:

$ export AZURE_TENANT_ID=<your-tenant-id-goes-here>
$ export AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID=<your-subscription-id-goes-here>

You can find these values by using the Azure CLI: az account show

Next, create a service principal with Contributor permissions for your subscription.

You can optionally use a service principal with a more restricted permission set (for example contributor to just a Resource Group), but that will restrict what you can do with ASO. See using reduced permissions for more details.

$ az ad sp create-for-rbac -n azure-service-operator --role contributor \
    --scopes /subscriptions/$AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID

This should give you output including the following:

"appId": "xxxxxxxxxx",
"displayName": "azure-service-operator",
"name": "http://azure-service-operator",
"password": "xxxxxxxxxxx",
"tenant": "xxxxxxxxxxxxx"

Once you have created a service principal, set the following variables to your app ID and password values:

$ export AZURE_CLIENT_ID=<your-client-id>         # This is the appID from the service principal we created.
$ export AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET=<your-client-secret> # This is the password from the service principal we created.

Create the Azure Service Operator namespaced secret

The secret must be named aso-credential and be created in the namespace you’d like to create ASO resources in.

Note

To learn about the ASO global secret, which works across all namespaces, or per-resource secrets, see authentication documentation.

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
 name: aso-credential
 namespace: default
stringData:
 AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID: "$AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID"
 AZURE_TENANT_ID: "$AZURE_TENANT_ID"
 AZURE_CLIENT_ID: "$AZURE_CLIENT_ID"
 AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET: "$AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET"
EOF

Usage

Once the controller has been installed in your cluster, you should be able to see the ASO pod running.

$ kubectl get pods -n azureserviceoperator-system
NAME                                                READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
azureserviceoperator-controller-manager-5b4bfc59df-lfpqf   2/2     Running   0          24s

To view the logs for the running ASO controller, take note of the pod name shown above and then run the following command.

$ kubectl logs -n azureserviceoperator-system azureserviceoperator-controller-manager-5b4bfc59df-lfpqf manager

Let’s create an Azure ResourceGroup in westcentralus with the name “aso-sample-rg”. Create a file called rg.yaml with the following contents:

apiVersion: resources.azure.com/v1api20200601
kind: ResourceGroup
metadata:
  name: aso-sample-rg
  namespace: default
spec:
  location: westcentralus

Then apply the file to your cluster:

$ kubectl apply -f rg.yaml
# resourcegroup.resources.azure.com/aso-sample-rg created

Once the resource group has been created, we can see what it looks like.

$ kubectl describe resourcegroups/aso-sample-rg -n default

The output will be similar to this:

Name:         aso-sample-rg
Namespace:    default
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  serviceoperator.azure.com/operator-namespace: azureserviceoperator-system
              serviceoperator.azure.com/resource-id: /subscriptions/82acd5bb-4206-47d4-9c12-a65db028483d/resourceGroups/aso-sample-rg
API Version:  resources.azure.com/v1beta20200601
Kind:         ResourceGroup
Metadata:
  Creation Timestamp:  2023-08-31T01:25:50Z
  Finalizers:
    serviceoperator.azure.com/finalizer
  Generation:        1
  Resource Version:  3198
  UID:               70e2fef1-8c43-452f-8260-ffe5a73470fb
Spec:
  Azure Name:  aso-sample-rg
  Location:    westcentralus
Status:
  Conditions:
    Last Transition Time:  2023-08-31T01:25:58Z
    Observed Generation:   1
    Reason:                Succeeded
    Status:                True
    Type:                  Ready
  Id:                      /subscriptions/82acd5bb-4206-47d4-9c12-a65db028483d/resourceGroups/aso-sample-rg
  Location:                westcentralus
  Name:                    aso-sample-rg
  Properties:
    Provisioning State:  Succeeded
  Type:                  Microsoft.Resources/resourceGroups
Events:
  Type    Reason               Age                From                     Message
  ----    ------               ----               ----                     -------
  Normal  CredentialFrom       42s (x2 over 42s)  ResourceGroupController  Using credential from "azureserviceoperator-system/aso-controller-settings"
  Normal  BeginCreateOrUpdate  35s                ResourceGroupController  Successfully sent resource to Azure with ID "/subscriptions/82acd5bb-4206-47d4-9c12-a65db028483d/resourceGroups/aso-sample-rg"

We can delete the resource group from the cluster. This will also delete it from Azure.

$ kubectl delete resourcegroups/aso-sample-rg
# resourcegroup.resources.azure.com "aso-sample-rg" deleted

For samples of additional resources, see the resource samples directory.

Tearing it down

Warning

if you kubectl delete an ASO resource from your cluster, ASO will delete the Azure resource. This can be dangerous if you were to do this with an existing resource group which contains resources you do not wish to be deleted.

If you want to delete the resources you’ve created, just kubectl delete each of the Azure resources.

If you want to delete the cluster resource without affecting the Azure resource, apply the annotation serviceoperator.azure.com/reconcile-policy: skip first.

As for deleting controller components, just kubectl delete -f the release manifests you created to get started. For example, creating and deleting cert-manager.

# remove the cert-manager components
$ kubectl delete -f https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.4/cert-manager.y

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