We looking to create a pipeline to update our multi-tenant azure environment. We need to perform some actions during the update per tenant. To accomplish this, we would like to create a job per tenant, so we can process tenants in parallel. To accomplish this, I want to use a runtime parameter to pass the tenants to update to my pipeline as follows:
parameters:
- name: tenants
type: object
the value of the tenants parameter might look like something like this:
- Name: "customer1"
Someotherproperty: "some value"
- Name: "customer2"
Someotherproperty: "some other value"
to generate the jobs, we do something like this:
stages:
- stage:
jobs:
- job: Update_Tenant
strategy:
matrix:
${{ each tenant in parameters.Tenants }}:
${{ tenant.tenantName }}:
name: ${{ tenant.tenantName }}
someproperty: ${{ tenant.otherProperty }}
maxParallel: 2
steps:
- checkout: none
- script: echo $(name).$(someproperty)
Now what we need, is some way to fill this tenants
parameter. Now I tried a few solutions:
Ideally I would like to put a build stage before the
Update_Tenants
stage to call a REST api to get the tenants, and expand thetenants
parameter when theUpdate_Tenants
stage starts, but this is not supported AFAIK, since parameter expansion is done when the pipeline starts.A less ideal but still workable option would have been to create a variable group yaml file containing the tenants, and include this variable group in my pipeline, and use the
${{ variables.Tenants }}
syntax to reference them. However, for some reason, variables can only be strings.
The only solution I can currently think of, is to create a pipeline that calls a REST api to get the tenants to update, and then uses the azure devops api to queue the actual update process with the correct parameter value. But this feels like a bit of a clunky workaround to accomplish this.
Now my question is, are there any (better?) alternatives to accomplish what I want to do?