Terraform: Create Automation Account With Source Controlled Runbooks

Description:

You can provision an Azure Automation Account and source control the runbooks in the same code.

Note: You can see the code for this post on my Github repo.

To Resolve:

1. First, I ran a plan and it said it would create 9 resources.

2. Then I ran the apply and it failed because I haven’t registered the provider yet:

   Error: creating Automation Account: (Name "aa-sbx-scus-aa" / Resource Group "aa-sbx-scus-aa-rg"): automation.AccountClient#CreateOrUpdate: Failure responding to request: StatusCode=409 -- Original Error: autorest/azure: Service returned an error. Status=409 Code="MissingSubscriptionRegistration" Message="The subscription is not registered to use namespace 'Microsoft.Automation'. See https://aka.ms/rps-not-found for how to register subscriptions." Details=[{"code":"MissingSubscriptionRegistration","message":"The subscription is not registered to use namespace 'Microsoft.Automation'. See https://aka.ms/rps-not-found for how to register subscriptions.","target":"Microsoft.Automation"}]
   

   • You can use a powershell script, az cli, or the GUI to register providers. I just went to the Subscription in the UI and registered by going to the Resource Providers blade and searching ‘automation’. I also did ‘network’ because I will probably create a VNET in the future, more to come later.

3. Anyways, re-ran the apply and this time it was gave a different error about the automation schedule:

╷
│ Error: start_time is "2022-08-01 16:05:16 -0700 -0700" and should be at least "5m0s" in the future
│ 
│   with azurerm_automation_schedule.monday_tuesday,
│   on aa-schedules.tf line 2, in resource "azurerm_automation_schedule" "monday_tuesday":
│    2: resource "azurerm_automation_schedule" "monday_tuesday" {
│ 
╵
╷
│ Error: start_time is "2022-08-01 16:05:16 -0700 -0700" and should be at least "5m0s" in the future
│ 
│   with azurerm_automation_schedule.wednes_thurs,
│   on aa-schedules.tf line 14, in resource "azurerm_automation_schedule" "wednes_thurs":
│   14: resource "azurerm_automation_schedule" "wednes_thurs" {
│ 
╵

1. So I corrected the timezones and schedule and it was successful. Here is what it did:

   • Created rg: aa-sbx-scus-aa-rg
   • Created automation account: aa-sbx-scus-aa
   • Created two runbooks: Show-VMs (aa-sbx-scus-aa/Show-VMs) and Show-VMs-2 (aa-sbx-scus-aa/Show-VMs-2)
   • The Automation Account got a System Identity Assigned
   • The Automation Account System Identity is linked to the Reader role at the subscription level allowing the runbook permissions.

2. Output from Show-VMs:

   Mode             : Process
   ContextDirectory : 
   ContextFile      : 
   CacheDirectory   : 
   CacheFile        : 
   Settings         : {}
   
   Successfully authenticated and logged in using Automation Accounts System Identity
   
   Subscription has no VM objects
   
   Current Virtual Machines: 
   
   Example reading vars....
   
   Variable value: Hello, Terraform Basic Test.
   
   

3. As expected, output from Show-VMs-2:

   Mode             : Process
   ContextDirectory : 
   ContextFile      : 
   CacheDirectory   : 
   CacheFile        : 
   Settings         : {}
   
   Successfully authenticated and logged in using Automation Accounts System Identity
   
   Subscription has no VM objects
   
   Current Virtual Machines: 
   
   Example reading vars....
   
   Variable value: Hello, Terraform Basic Test.
   
   This is example 2
   
   

4. I then ran my destroy workflow to save on costs.