The purpose of a PoC machine is to try stuff, build , test , break , rebuild and so on. With ASDK it is also the case, maybe you would like to try an azure AD deployment do some test and rebuild using an ADFS deployment to see the differences. Maybe you have also noticed from the ASDK downloader that there is an option to download “in development build” which is greyed out at the moment. Well yes, you will see coming development builds on a regular basis (likely on a monthly basis).

So there are many reasons to reinstall your ASDK on a regular basis but yes it can be time consuming assuming you deploy all resource providers every time and so on . To save time on rebuilding you should focus on a DevOps approach and infrastructure as a code starting by the usage of ARM templates regarding your tenant workloads. This is widely adopted and used today.

What about the ASDK infrastructure ? well as we know it takes between 3 to 4 hours to deploy a PoC machine then we have many configuration steps such as registration, provider installation, configuration of quotas, plan and so on.

Well since i am really curious and passionate about this technology that we bring to you through Azure Stack, i am one of these guys spending a lot of time on testing and redeploying my environments on a regular basis. In the same time i  cannot grant this a day per week because yes configuring an ASDK can take a full day and once you know the framework and are familiar with it usually you do not enjoy these redeployments.

So I’ve decided to start saving time by automating as much as i could the post deployment steps. I share with you my current script that i use and will improve over time with the azure stack powershell module bringing more and more capabilities (same goes to AzureStack-Tools)

It is not perfect nor fancy and can of course be (and will be) improved.

What it will do ?  Take a look at the full description on my github repo : https://github.com/alainv-msft/Azure-Stack/tree/master/Scripts

Once the script is done you will still need to create your quotas,plans,SKUs, add the mysql VM to your mysql RP and deploy a SQL VM to do the same for sqlRP. Appservice sources will be in c:\temp\appservice directory and still need to be deployed manually.

Over time I will include these actions into the script. (feel free to contribute on GitHub)