Launching a Windows server in Azure

We will not use Ansible to deploy the Azure resources as we will do in Chapter 9, Moving to the Cloud; instead, we will use the Azure CLI to launch our VM.

Note

As some of the commands in this chapter will be pretty long, I will break them up with a backslash. In Linux command lines, the backslash (\) followed by a newline is a line continuation character. It lets you split a single command over multiple lines for better readability.

Start by changing to the Chapter07 folder within your checked-out copy of the repository that accompanies this title and run the following commands:

$ MYIP=$(curl https://api.ipify.org 2>/dev/null)
$ VMPASSWORD=$(openssl rand -base64 24)
$ echo $VMPASSWORD > VMPASSWORD

The first two commands set two variables on your command line; the first uses the ipify service (https://www.ipify.org/) to populate the $MYIP variable with the public IP address of your current network session.

The second generates...