Authoring workspaces templates

Azure TRE workspaces, workspace services, and user resources are Porter bundles. Porter bundles are based on Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB).

Workspace authors are free to choose the technology stack for provisioning resources (e.g., ARM templates, Terraform etc.), but the Azure TRE framework sets certain requirements for the bundle manifests, which specify the credentials, input and output parameters, deployment actions among other things.

This document describes the requirements, and the process to author a template.

Tip

Use the base workspace bundle as reference or as the basis for the new bundle.

To create a bundle from scratch follow the Porter Quickstart Guide (porter create CLI command will generate a new bundle in the current directory).

Read more about Porter in Resource Processor doc.

Prerequisites

Docker installed
Porter installed
Azure TRE instance deployed to test against

Workspace bundle manifest

The manifest of a workspace bundle is the porter.yaml file (see Author Bundles in Porter documentation). This section describes the mandatory credentials, input and output parameters of a TRE workspace bundle.

Credentials

A workspace bundle requires the following credentials to provision resources in Azure:

Azure tenant ID
Azure subscription ID
The client ID of a service principal with privileges to provision resources
The client secret (password) of a service principal

The credentials are provided as environment variables by the deployment runner. The bundle author must use the following environment variable names:

ARM_TENANT_ID
ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID
ARM_CLIENT_ID
ARM_CLIENT_SECRET

The names of the Porter credentials (name field in porter.yaml) can be freely chosen by the author.

Example:

credentials:
  - name: azure_tenant_id
    env: ARM_TENANT_ID
  - name: azure_subscription_id
    env: ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID
  - name: azure_client_id
    env: ARM_CLIENT_ID
  - name: azure_client_secret
    env: ARM_CLIENT_SECRET

Parameters

This section describes the mandatory (input) parameters of a workspace bundle manifest.

Parameter	Type	Description	Example value
`tre_id`	string	Unique ID of for the TRE instance.	`tre-dev-42`
`workspace_id`	string	Unique 4-character long, alphanumeric workspace ID.	`0a9e`
`azure_location`	string	Azure location (region) to deploy the workspace resource to.	`westeurope`
`address_space`	string	VNet address space for the workspace services.	`10.2.1.0/24`

tre_id can be found in the resource names of the Azure TRE instance; for example the resource group name of the Azure TRE instance based on the example in the above table would be "rg-tre-dev-42".

Similarly to tre_id, workspace_id is used in the resource names of the workspace. The resource group name of the workspace must be of form "rg-<tre_id>-ws-<workspace_id>", for example: "rg-tre-dev-42-ws-0a9e".

All the values for the required parameters will be provided by the deployment runner.

Any custom parameters are picked up by Azure TRE API and will be queried from the user deploying the workspace bundle. Custom parameters should also be defined in the template_schema.json file at the root of the bundle. This file follows the JSON schema standard and can be used by a user interface to generate a UI for the user to input the parameters.

Output

Todo

After a workspace with virtual machines is implemented this section can be written based on that. (Outputs in Porter documentation to be linked here too.)

Actions

The required actions are the main two of CNAB spec:

install - Deploys/repairs the workspace Azure resources, and must be idempotent
uninstall - Tears down (deletes) the Azure resources of the workspace and its services

Workspace service bundle manifests

Workspace service bundles are generated in the same way as workspace bundles.

The mandatory parameters for workspace services are:

Parameter	Type	Description	Example value
`tre_id`	string	Unique ID of for the TRE instance.	`tre-dev-42`
`workspace_id`	string	Unique 4-character long, alphanumeric workspace ID.	`0a9e`

User resource bundle manifests

User Resource bundles are generated in the same way as workspace bundles and workspace services bundles. The main difference is that a workspace service type needs to be supplied when registering a user resource template, as it only applies to a given workspace service.

The mandatory parameters for User Resources are:

Parameter	Type	Description	Example value
`tre_id`	string	Unique ID of for the TRE instance.	`tre-dev-42`
`workspace_id`	string	Unique 4-character long, alphanumeric workspace ID.	`0a9e`

Azure Resources Tagging

TRE Cost Reporting is based on Azure tagging to be able to generate cost report for core services, shared services, workspace, workspace services and user resources. Templates authors need to make sure that underling Azure resources are tagged with the relevent tags, for more information see cost reporting:

Versioning

Workspace versions are the bundle versions specified in the metadata. The bundle versions should match the image tags in the container registry (see Publishing workspace bundle).

TRE does not provide means to update an existing workspace to a newer version. Instead, the user has to first uninstall the old version and then install the new one. The CNAB upgrade or a Porter custom ("update") action may be used in the future version of TRE to do this automatically.

Publishing workspace bundle

See Registering workspace templates.

Manual Deployment

Caution

Resources should be deployed using the API (i.e. through the Swagger UI as described in the setup instructions). Only deploy manually for development/testing purposes.

Create a copy of the Porter bundle's environment settings from /templates/<scope>/.env.sample with the name .env and update the variables with the appropriate values.

Build and deploy the Porter bundle

make bundle-build DIR=./templates/<scope>/<bundle_name>
make bundle-install DIR=./templates/<scope>/<bundle_name>