Welcome to a fresh new series about deploying Azure Virtual Desktop environments automated called the “AVD Automation Cocktail”. In this series I will serve several cocktails and will take you along on the AVD automated deployment journey with different types of automation languages. Every type has its own pros and cons, deployment strategy, parameter structure and commands. In the series all of these items will pass and hopefully it will give you a good overview about the possibilities.
As mentioned in earlier posts Azure DevOps is a really nice way to deploy Azure resources automated. During my travel through Azure DevOps for managing Windows Virtual Desktop resources I moved from classic pipelines and releases to the new YAML pipelines. Using YAML has a lot of advantages in relation to classic. But there are some new challenges coming, approval or manual interventions for example. In this article I will explain how to use approvals and checks with dynamic recipients in DevOps environments within a YAML configuration.
Security became important more and more. It is recommend, now the days arrived where the most people work from home and IT is moving to the public cloud, to use a good firewall with less complexity as possible. In case of WVD within the current situation an IT environment can be complex. In this article I will explain how configure an Azure Firewall for WVD automated with premium options, which came in public preview at 16 February 2021. At the end I will show how to deploy an Azure Firewall specially for a WVD environment with all the needed steps automated.