Azure Lighthouse and Azure Arc are native Azure services that let you manage resources that don’t “live” in your Azure subscription. I wanted to test them out, but to do that, I needed a second environment outside of my normal Azure testing subscription.
Personally, I love when people document things end to end and don’t assume I already have the pre-requisites configured. So, in the spirit of writing something I'd like to read, this blog series documents the end to end setup from the Azure Subscription, VSCode, GitHub repo, resource deployment and finally Azure Lighthouse and Azure Arc setup.
I’ve broken it up into sections so its east to jump to the part that suits you best.
Part 1 — Azure Subscription Signup
Part 2 — Switch from PowerShell ISE to Visual Studio Code
Part 3 — Get Started with a GitHub Repo (fork, clone, edit & push the repo)
Part 4 — Deploy Some Test Azure Resources & Azure AD Users
Part 5 — Use PowerShell to configure Lighthouse and Manage Resources in Another Subscription
Before I could configure Arc or Lighthouse I needed to extend my test Azure environment so I had some test “on premises” and “customer” resources to manage. You’re going to need two Azure subscriptions to do this.
Ideally, you’ll have access to a dev or sandpit subscription at work and will be able to sign up for a Visual Studio Dev Essentials program Azure Subscription as the second.
Sign Up for a Free Azure Account
- Go to https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/free-developer-offers/
or
If you’re a student with a .edu email address sign up to Azure for Students with the added bonus of not needing a credit card - Scroll down to Microsoft Azure “Get Started for Free” and click “Start Free”
- Sign in with your personal Microsoft account (mine is @outlook.com) and follow the bouncing ball to get everything activated.
- You will need to enter your CC details but we’ll set up alerts later on to help make sure you don’t incur any charges
- If you have issues or want more detailed information check out the Official Microsoft Documentation or for a list of the programs that come with free Azure credits check out this post.
NB:
If you’re creating two accounts so you can work with Lighthouse and Arc like I was, you need to use a unique email address, postal address and CC for both accounts which can be a challenge!
The free account is fairly limited but you have 3o days to play around and 12 months of some services.
The free subscription will be de-activated after 30 days.
You can still log in but can’t upgrade or deploy any resources — so “upgrade’ before your 30 days are out if you’d like to keep the subscription long term.
