Set up an Azure account for Exasol Personal

Learn how to set up an Azure account to deploy Exasol Personal.

Prerequisites

The following procedure assumes that you have a basic understanding of how Azure works and how to manage access using Microsoft Entra ID and Azure role-based access control (RBAC). For more information, refer to the Azure documentation.

The Azure subscription must have the permissions and quota to create virtual machines, networking, managed disks, and storage accounts in the region that you want to use.

Create an Azure account

If you do not have an Azure account, visit the Azure home page to create one.

In the Azure portal, open Subscriptions, then create a new subscription or choose an existing one for Exasol Personal deployments.

Make sure that the subscription has enough quota for the VM family and region that you plan to use.

Steps in the Azure portal

Choose the Azure user account that will run Exasol Personal from your local machine.
Open the target subscription in Subscriptions.
Open Access control (IAM) for that subscription.
Make sure that this user has permission on the target subscription.
Assign one of the following roles to that user at subscription scope:
- Azure built-in Contributor role
- A custom role based on rbac-role.broad.json
- A custom role based on rbac-role.minimal.json

The easiest option is usually Contributor on the target subscription. When adding a role assignment, the built-in Contributor role may appear under the Privileged administrator roles tab in the role picker.

Use only one of these options. You do not need all of them.

The custom roles are mainly for organizations that do not want to grant the built-in Contributor role. In that case, an Azure administrator can create a custom role based on one of the roles provided in the Exasol GitHub repository and assign it to the user.

If you want to use one of the custom role examples provided by Exasol, replace <subscription-id> in the JSON file before creating the role definition in Azure.

The current Azure preset needs permission to create and delete resource groups, networking, virtual machines, managed disks, and storage accounts, and it must also be able to read storage account keys. For more information, see Azure Infrastructure as Code Architecture in the Exasol GitHub repository.

If your organization uses conditional access, multi-factor authentication, or approval flows in Azure, additional steps may be required. For more information, refer to the Azure documentation.

Steps on your local machine

Install the Azure CLI if it is not already installed. Follow the official installation guide for your platform:

How to install the Azure CLI
Sign in with the Azure CLI:
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```
az login
```
If you have access to more than one subscription, select the subscription that Exasol Personal should use:
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```
az account set --subscription "<subscription-id-or-name>"
```
Verify the active subscription:
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```
az account show
```

If this is a brand-new subscription and Azure reports provider registration errors during deployment, register the required resource providers:

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az provider register --namespace Microsoft.Compute
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.Network
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.Storage
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.Resources

For more information about Azure CLI authentication and subscription selection, refer to the Azure documentation.

Next steps

Deploy Exasol Personal (full procedure)