How to use Ansible with Azure Bastion

@Thakee Nathees

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A Platform. Thank you for reaching out & I hope you are doing well.

I understand that you would like to know the best practices for using Ansible for deploying resources in Azure.

Azure Bastion Service is a PaaS Service, that is used to provide SSH or RDP Connectivity to VMs in Azure via Browser

• Let's not confuse this with the VM you have created and named as bastion.
• So, we shall call this VM as "vmNamedBastion"

Now,

• For installing Ansible in an Azure VM , You can refer : Configure Ansible on an Azure VM
  • This example uses a Linux distros (CentOS)
• From the official Ansible documentation, I see there are some restrictions with using a Windows server.
  • Refer : Installing Ansible - Installation Guide
• 

Point to Note:

• Just because you have installed Ansible on an Azure VM, does not mean you can use Ansible and deploy resources directly in Azure.
• You still have to authenticate your requests like you would do in a regular server.
• Because Azure VM only provides you Data plane connectivity to Azure and not Control Plane connectivity.
  • i.e., Just like you should sign in to use Azure Portal even if you are inside an Azure VM.
• To configure authentication, refer Create Azure credentials
  • Official documentation on how to get the credentials : https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/scenario_guides/guide_azure.html
• From here, you should be able to Write and run Ansible playbooks

To Summarize:

#1 "confused on where to run ansible and there is no way for me to install ansible on that bastion host"

• You can refer to this for installation guide

#2 "how the connection works"

• The connection is via Public Internet
• The authentication can be done Service Principal or using Azure Active Directory Username/Password
  • I would prefer and suggest using Service Principal as AAD auth does not support "Multi-Factor Authentication"

These documents may come in handy:

• How to create a service principal.
• Create a Linux virtual machines in Azure using Ansible

Thanks,

Kapil.

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