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Deploy custom images and NixOS VMs to Azure

0. Background

Wanted to use NixOps to deploy NixOS virtual machines to the Azure cloud, but apparently the Azure backend has been removed. Cole Mickens wrote a script called azure-new, and shared it in the Nixpkgs repo, which is basically a replacement for the missing NixOps. backend. (There was already a script called azure, hence the name.) The notion is that once the NixOS machines are deployed, they can be managed with NixOps. (TODO: Prove this statement.)

Created a pull request with some changes that made a script more straightforward for myself, but Cole already started working on a more modern alternative, flake-azure-demo. (For help and more info see IRC channel #nixos-azure, with logs.)

Not being up to date with flakes and not wanting to lose my changes (or have them embedded in thousands of Nixpkgs repo branches), I moved all related commits into this repo. (Stackoverflow threads that helped: How to show git log history (i.e., all the related commits) for a sub directory of a git repo? and How to copy commits from one Git repo to another?.)

1. Demo

This has been part of the original script, and it may be relevant still.

Here's a demo of this being used: https://asciinema.org/a/euXb9dIeUybE3VkstLWLbvhmp

This is meant to be an example image that you can copy into your own project and modify to your own needs. Notice that the example image includes a built-in test user account, which by default uses your ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub as an authorized_key.

2. Usage

  1. git clone https://github.com/society-for-the-blind/azure-new.git

  2. cd azure-new/nixos/maintainers/scripts/azure-new/

  3. Create Nix expression(s) (or modify the existing ones) to build an Azure image (See 2.1)

  4. nix-shell (See 2.2)

  5. Create and upload an image with upload-image.sh

  6. Create and boot up a virtual machine from a NixOS image with boot-vm.sh

Again, the reason behind the weird directory paths is that this script has been pulled out from the main Nixpkgs repo and didn't feel the urgent need to do any changes to them (yet).

2.0 Examples

The examples below assume that you have started the nix-shell with

$ nix-shell --arg pkgs 'import <nixpkgs> {}'

or similar.

2.0.1 Create and upload image, then create a NixOS virtual machine and boot it up

$ ./upload-image.sh --resource-group sftb-custom-images-rg --image-name sftb-nixos-tr2 --image-nix tr2-image/image.nix

$ ./boot-vm.sh --resource-group sftb-vms-rg --image sftb-nixos-tr2 --vm-name tr2-backup-test

Note The options --image-name for upload-image.sh and --image for boot-vm.sh are different on purpose, even though many times they would accept the same value. The reason is that the former script creates the image and you supply the name, whereas the latter refers to an already existing object.

2.0.2 Same as above but combine image creation with booting up the VM

$ ./upload-image.sh -g sftb-custom-images-rg -n sftb-nixos-tr2 -i tr2-image/image.nix -l  westus2 --boot-sh-opts "vm-name=tempnixos"

At this point the only mandatory argument to --boot-sh-opts is vm-name; it will call boot-vm.sh behind the scenes with the provided --vm-name argument and the resource group and image name supplied to upload-image.sh.

To avoid the image and the VM ending up in the same resource group, just supply a different resource group to --boot-sh-opts. For example:

$ ./upload-image.sh \
> -g sftb-custom-images-rg \
> -n sftb-nixos-tr2 \
> -i tr2-image/image.nix \
> -l  westus2 \
> --boot-sh-opts "vm-name=tempnixos;resource-group=new-rg"

2.0.3 Create and boot up VM from existing image

$ ./boot-vm.sh -g sftb-vms-rg -i sftb-nixos-tr2 -n tr2-backup-test

where sftb-nixos-tr2 is an existing image in your Azure account. The resource group will be created if not present.

2.1 Create Nix expression(s)

Following Cole's original setup, image.nix will create an Azure image and will call system.nix in the process, where the latter will end up becoming the new system's configuration.nix.

  • The original examples are in ./nixos/maintainers/scripts/azure-new/examples and they still refer to paths as they were in the Nixpkgs repo.

  • The ones in the ./nixos/maintainers/scripts/azure-new/tr2-image will work out of the box and up-to-date, but they are specific to our services.

.
├── COPYING
├── nixos
│   ├── maintainers
│   │   └── scripts
│   │       └── azure-new
│   │           ├── azure -> /nix/store/1p5naccsxq55xlk9g6c8yajm89nrg1ag-azure-image
│   │           ├── boot-vm.sh
│   │           ├── examples
│   │           │   └── basic
│   │           │       ├── image.nix
│   │           │       └── system.nix
│   │           ├── shell.nix
│   │           ├── tr2-image
│   │           │   ├── image.nix
│   │           │   └── system.nix
│   │           └── upload-image.sh
│   └── modules
│       └── virtualisation
│           └── azure-image.nix
└── README.md

10 directories, 10 files

2.2 Enter nix-shell

The provided shell.nix and image.nix will import the Nixpkgs repo's default.nix (as the script has been part of that repo) if no arguments are provided, therefore to avoid nix-shell erroring out, either change shell.nix towards your own package set or define the pkgs when invoking it:

$ nix-shell --arg pkgs 'import <nixpkgs> {}'

You may have to look further though as system.nix (called by image.nix) relies on the virtualisation.azureImage (defined in azure-image.nix) attribute that, at the time of writing this, is not yet present in the 20.03 channel and you will need to find a Nixpkgs commit that works, mostly using trial and error.

This commit works, but I try to update this archive URL whenever I can:

$ nix-shell --arg pkgs 'import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/8e78c2cfbae.tar.gz") {}'

Some helpful stuff:

4. Limitations, quirks, etc.

4.1 Ancillary artifacts

4.1.1 Disks

A new disk (with the same name as the image) is generated every time upload-image.sh is used to avoid using storage accounts and to be able to upload images directly.

The disk is not deleted automatically, and re-use is not included in the script at the moment; to allow uplad, disks have to be in a specific state, and it is error-prone to get it right. Please see notes in upload-image.sh.

4.1.2 Resource groups

Both upload-image.sh and boot-vm.sh have a --resource-group (or -g) switch to provide additional granularity of organizing resources.

Some Best practices for naming your Microsoft Azure resources.

4.1.3 Identities

Aside from creating and booting up a VM, boot-vm.sh also creates a managed service identity, with the same name as the provided resource group. (See also az identity Azure CLI command.)

TODO/QUESTION: Why? What are the benefits? This step is entirely optional, and az vm create doesn't require it. If not need it, just rip out the relevant parts in boot-vm.sh.

4.1.4 New SSH keypair by default for each VM

Seemed like a sensible default. If you want to provide your own keys, please take a look at the very end of boot-vm.sh (and maybe system.nix as well).

5. Future Work

  1. If the user specifies a hard-coded user, then the agent could be removed. Probably has security benefits; definitely has closure-size benefits. (It's likely the VM will need to be booted with a special flag. See: Azure/azure-cli#12775 for details.)