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Hub Deployment

The VIO hub modules can be deployed in any cloud, for this tutorial we decided to use Azure and its IoT solution Azure IoT Edge/Hub

This section allows you to create all the Azure infrastructure for VIO: - Storage resources (Storage Account + PostgreSQL) - The IoT Hub - An Azure function (telemetry_saver) to save Device-to-Cloud telemetry data in PostgreSQL - An Event Grid Topic to connect IoT Hub with the telemetry_saver Azure function

Prerequisites

Before getting started, you need to install Ansible and its dependencies for Azure and PostgreSQL.

$ cd ./deployment/
$ conda create -n ansible python=3
$ conda activate ansible
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection
$ ansible-galaxy collection install community.grafana

You'll also need : - The Azure CLI - The Azure CLI IoT extension extension - The Azure Functions Core Tools

On MacOS, these can be installed as follows:

$ brew update
$ brew install azure-cli
$ az extension add --name azure-iot
$ brew tap azure/functions
$ brew install azure-functions-core-tools@3

Once you have installed azure-cli, you can login to Azure using your Accenture account:

$ az login

Make sure you are using the Azure subscription IX-Visual-Inspection-MDI. You can check that with:

$ az account list --output table

If IX-Visual-Inspection-MDI is not the default subscription, you can switch to it with the following command:

$ az account set --subscription "IX-Visual-Inspection-MDI"

Define the mandatory environment variables

In order to create and configure all the Azure infrastructure, we need to define some environment variables: 

$ export REGISTRY_USERNAME=<your_gitlab_username>
$ export REGISTRY_PASSWORD=<your_gitlab_container_registry_token>
$ export POSTGRES_USERNAME=<postgres_admin_username>
$ export POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<postgres_admin_password>
$ export AZURE_STORAGE_CONNECTION_STRING=<azure_storage_connection_string>

Registry Username

firstname.lastname (i.e nicolas.dupont)

Registry Password

You can find it on gitlab, click on your profil picture (top right corner) --> preferences. On the Access Tokens category, you can generate a token. I suggest no expiration date, and you select all the scopes. Keep this token safe, once it's generated you cannot retrieve it on gitlab anymore.

Postgres Username and Password.

  • To Get the Postgres username, go the Azure Portal, our subscription IX-Visual-Inspection-MDI --> our resource group vio-rg-dev --> the vio-function-app-dev function app. On the left side bar menu, click on Configuration and unhide the POSTGRES_USER field. You only need what's before the @. Here it's vioadmin
  • To Ge the Postgres password, it's on the same page but unhide the POSTGRES_PASSWORD field.

postgres_username_password.png

Create Azure Infrastructure

The following command creates all the Azure IoT infrastructure for VIO.

$ ansible-playbook ansible/create_azure_cloud_infrastructure.yml -e 'ansible_python_interpreter=<path_to_your_conda_env_python_interpreter>'

Deploy hub monitoring (grafana)

To deploy Grafana dashboard and data-sources, run the following playbook :

$ ansible-playbook -i ansible/inventory/production.ini ansible/update_grafana_dashboard.yml --ask-pass

This will copy the files on the Grafana resource deployed in Azure and relaunch the grafana service to take into account the brand uploaded files.