Adopting existing Azure resources

What is adoption?

Adoption is when Azure Service Operator starts managing a resource which already exists in Azure but was not previously being managed by ASO.

ASO adopts resources by default. For example, if you create a Storage Account named “mystorageaccount” in resource group “myrg” in subscription “dev1” via ASO, but a storage account with that name already exists in that resource group in that subscription, then ASO will automatically update the existing storage account configuration to match what you specified in the StorageAccount resource in your cluster. Subsequent changes to the StorageAccount resource will be propagated to Azure as normal, and changes to the storage account via ad-hoc mechanisms such as the portal will be lost as ASO reconciles and manages the resource.

For more details on adoption and why ASO chose to do what it does, see the original adoption design.

Types of adoption.

• Adopt and manage: This is the default experience, when ASO finds an existing resource in Azure it immediately adopts it and starts managing it. Deleting the resource in ASO will delete the underlying resource in Azure as well.
• Adopt and manage, but do not delete: Configured by setting the serviceoperator.azure.com/reconcile-policy to detach-on-delete before creating the resource.

Helpful tools

If you want to take an existing Azure resource and adopt it as is into ASO, you can painstakingly recreate its existing configuration in ASO, or you can use the asoctl import azure-resource command.