Deploy Skytap on Azure using Bicep Language to run your IBM Power workloads.

4 min readNov 20, 2023

Leverage Infrastructure-as-Code to deploy Skytap on Azure with Bicep Language.

Deploy Skytap on Azure using Bicep Language to run your IBM Power workloads.

This article aims to help you deploy Skytap in your environment using Infrastructure-as-Code with Azure Bicep Language.

Azure Bicep is a domain-specific language (DSL) that uses a declarative syntax to deploy Azure resources. Bicep is an abstraction on top of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to define Azure resources using declarative Infrastructure as Code.

Skytap can help you migrate IBM power estates without refactoring or rewriting. It is an excellent solution for running the IBM Power and infrastructure management.

“Skytap on Azure is a service that runs IBM Power and x86 traditional workloads on hardware in Azure datacenters. Organizations that run applications on IBM Power–based AIX or Linux operating systems can migrate them to Azure with little upfront effort.”

Skytap enables your specialized workloads — AIX, IBM i (AS/400), Linux on IBM Power, and x86 — to seamlessly operate in Azure and leverage fundamental cloud infrastructure capabilities such as on-demand capacity, self-service provisioning, high availability, and disaster recovery (HA/DR).

Additionally, Skytap allows you to effortlessly migrate and run SAP® NetWeaver® workloads in Azure, irrespective of the operating system, without rewriting or refactoring.

Prerequisites

An Active Azure account: You can create an account for free.
A resource group in your Azure subscription

Source Code.

You can find the code of this solution in the following URL; feel free to contribute!

👉https://github.com/daveRendon/azinsider/tree/main/application-workloads/skytap

1. Solution Overview

We will author a Bicep template that creates an instance of the SaaS offering of Skytap on Azure.

The solution will include the following files:

📄 main.bicep: This is the Bicep template
📄 azuredeploy.parameters.json: This parameter file contains the values for deploying your Bicep template.

2. Azure Bicep Template — parameters

Create a new file in your working directory and name it main.bicep . We will define the following parameters:

param planId string
param offerId string
param publisherId string
param quantity int
param termId string
param subscriptionId string
param riskPropertyBagHeader string
param autoRenew bool
param location string
param name string

3. Azure Bicep Template — resources

We will define the resource below:

resource skytap 'Microsoft.SaaS/resources@2018-03-01-beta' = {
  name: name
  location: location
  properties: {
    saasResourceName: name
    publisherId: publisherId
    SKUId: planId
    offerId: offerId
    quantity: quantity
    termId: termId
    autoRenew: autoRenew
    paymentChannelType: 'SubscriptionDelegated'
    paymentChannelMetadata: {
        AzureSubscriptionId: subscriptionId
    }
    storeFront: 'AzurePortal'
    riskPropertyBagHeader: riskPropertyBagHeader
}
}

4. Parameters file

Create a new file named azuredeploy.parameters.json. The code below shows the definition of the parameters file:

{
    "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentParameters.json#",
    "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
    "parameters": {
        "name": {
            "value": "skytap2"
        },
        "planId": {
            "value": "txm1r1_paygo_pub_oct23"
        },
        "offerId": {
            "value": "skytap-on-azure-main1"
        },
        "publisherId": {
            "value": "skytapinc"
        },
        "quantity": {
            "value": 1
        },
        "termId": {
            "value": "gmz7xq9ge3py"
        },
        "subscriptionId": {
            "value": "YOUR-SUBSCRIPTION-ID"
        },
        
        "autoRenew": {
            "value": false
        },
        "location": {
            "value": "global"
        },
       
        "riskPropertyBagHeader": {
            "value": "{\"entrypoint\":\"IbizaMarketplace (SaaS)\",\"session_Id\":\"7044a6a5c70346588b491ba2358c1641\",\"locale\":\"en-us\",\"total_price\":0,\"currency\":\"USD\",\"product_service\":\"SaaS\",\"ip_address\":\"YOUR-IP-ADDRESS-HERE\"}"
        }
    }
}