In the first post of this series, we showed how to create a Rocky Linux 8.5 virtual machine from CIQ’s Rocky Linux 8.5 image using Microsoft Azure’s web portal. This is the quickest way to get a running virtual machine since no software need be installed locally and the portal can be used to create (or name) key material, e.g. a .pem file. You get convenience and speed to an outcome, but you sacrifice repeatability and customization. In the second post of this series, we addressed repeatability not by creating new virtual machines from the portal, but – wait for it! – from the command line. This required installing some client side software, specifically the Azure CLI toolkit, but the installation and configuration can be done in less than an hour and is done once and for all as was shown in the previous article.

A previous article covered how to quickly launch a Rocky Linux instance using the web interface on the Azure portal. In this article, I summarize how to do a similar thing using the Azure CLI tools. A follow-on post will spin up virtual machines and immediately customize them with cloud-init, an interesting and rich topic in its own right.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to spin up a Rocky Linux virtual machine in Azure. Subsequent posts will explain how to do similar actions in code starting with the bash command line. Future posts will explain the journey Rocky Linux takes from the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation’s build service to generalized cloud images to cloud specific and vendor specialized images that you can spin up at a moment’s notice online with a web browser or via the vendor’s command line interface.