Automating The Deployment of Azure Data Factory Custom Activities

Custom Activities in Azure Data Factory (ADF) are a great way to extend the capabilities of ADF by utilising C# functionality. Custom Activities are useful if you need to move data to/from a data store that ADF does not support, or to transform/process data in a way that isn’t supported by Data Factory, as it can be used within an ADF pipeline.

Deploying Custom Activities to ADF is a manual process, which requires many steps. Microsoft’s documentation lists them as:

• Compile the project. Click Build from the menu and click Build Solution.
• Launch Windows Explorer, and navigate to bindebug or binrelease folder depending on the type of build.
• Create a zip file MyDotNetActivity.zip that contains all the binaries in the binDebug folder. Include the MyDotNetActivity.pdb file so that you get additional details such as line number in the source code that caused the issue if there was a failure.
• Create a blob container named customactivitycontainer if it does not already exist
• Upload MyDotNetActivity.zip as a blob to the customactivitycontainer in a general purpose Azure blob storage that is referred to by AzureStorageLinkedService.

The number of steps means that it can take some time to deploy Custom Activities and, because it is a manual process, can contain errors such as missing files or uploading to the wrong storage account.

To avoid that errors and delays caused by a manual deployment, we want to automate as much as possible. Thanks to PowerShell, it’s possible to automate the entire deployment steps.

The script to do this is as follows:

Login-AzureRmAccount
# Parameters 
$SourceCodePath = "C:PathToCustomActivitiesProject"
$ProjectFile ="CustomActivities.csproj"
$Configuration = "Debug"
#Azure parameters
$StorageAccountName = "storageaccountname"
$ResourceGroupName = "resourcegroupname"
$ContainerName = "blobcontainername"

# Local Variables
$MsBuild = "C:Program Files (x86)MSBuild14.0BinMSBuild.exe";            
$SlnFilePath = $SourceCodePath + $ProjectFile;            
                             
# Prepare the Args for the actual build            
$BuildArgs = @{            
     FilePath = $MsBuild            
     ArgumentList = $SlnFilePath, "/t:rebuild", ("/p:Configuration=" + $Configuration), "/v:minimal"            
     Wait = $true            
     }          
# Start the build            
Start-Process @BuildArgs 
# initiate a sleep to avoid zipping up a half built project
Sleep 5
# create zip file 
$zipfilename = ($ProjectFile -replace ".csproj", "") + ".zip"
$source = $SourceCodePath + "bin" + $Configuration
$destination = $SourceCodePath + $zipfilename
if(Test-path $destination) {Remove-item $destination}
Add-Type -assembly "system.io.compression.filesystem"
[io.compression.zipfile]::CreateFromDirectory($Source, $destination) 
 
#create storage account if not exists
$storageAccount = Get-AzureRmStorageAccount -ErrorAction Stop | where-object {$_.StorageAccountName -eq $StorageAccountName}       
if  ( !$storageAccount ) {
     $StorageLocation = (Get-AzureRmResourceGroup -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName).Location
     $StorageType = "Standard_LRS"
     New-AzureRmStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName  -Name $StorageAccountName -Location $StorageLocation -Type $StorageType
} 
 
#create container if not exists
$ContainerObject = Get-AzureStorageContainer -ErrorAction Stop | where-object {$_.Name -eq $ContainerName}
if (!$ContainerObject){
$storagekey = Get-AzureRmStorageAccountKey -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -Name $StorageAccountName
$context = New-AzureStorageContext -StorageAccountName $StorageAccountName -StorageAccountKey $storagekey.Key1 -Protocol Http
New-AzureStorageContainer -Name $ContainerName -Permission Blob -Context $context
}
 
# upload to blob
#set default context
Set-AzureRmCurrentStorageAccount -StorageAccountName $StorageAccountName -ResourceGroupName  $ResourceGroupName
Get-AzureRmStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -Name $StorageAccountName 
# Upload file
Set-AzureStorageBlobContent –Container $ContainerName -File $destination

By removing the manual steps in building, zipping and deploying ADF Custom Activities, you remove the risk of something going wrong and you add the reassurance that you have a consistent method of deployment which will hopefully speed up your overall development and deployments.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, do let me know.