Starting with the Rome release, running a MID server as a container is fully-supported. Here's an example of how you can manage your MID configuration as code, with an Azure pipeline to build the image.

NOTE: the process I had to follow did not leverage the "Build Docker Image" wizard offered by Azure because I don't have the requisite Azure AD access it requires to create a new application; if you have Azure AD admin rights in your Azure environment, this process should be even easier for you .

GitHub Repository

I created a GitHub repository by starting with the Docker recipe provided by my ServiceNow instance, underneath MID Server->Downloads. I added the following file, named "azure-pipelines.yml", to define the Azure pipeline behavior.

trigger:
- main
pool:
    vmImage: 'windows-2019'

variables:
- group: docker-vars
- name: imageName
  value: 'sandiego-win-mid-container'
- name: repoName
  value: 'myrepo.azurecr.io'
steps:
- script: |
    echo Logging in to ACR
    echo $(AZURE_SP_SECRET) | docker login $(repoName)--username $(AZURE_SP_ID) --password-stdin
    echo Building the Docker image...
    docker build -t $(imageName):latest .
    docker tag $(imageName):latest $(repoName)/$(imageName):latest
    echo Pushing the Docker image...
    docker push $(repoName)/$(imageName):latest

Azure Container Registry

To create a registry to hold my MID server images, I use a command like this:

az acr create --name <Registry Name> --resource-group <myresourcegroup> --sku Standard

Azure Variables

Because I lack the Azure AD privileges to create a new application, I need to populate credentials for logging into my Azure container registry. I did this by doing the following:

- I obtained credentials for an Azure Service Principal which has Contributor access to the registry created above

- I navigated to "Library" under my Azure DevOps project and clicking "+ Variable Group". I named the variable group "docker-vars" and populate it as follows:

Name	Value
AZURE_SP_ID
AZURE_SP_SECRET	(designated as a "secret" value)

Azure Pipeline

Azure's built-in GitHub integration makes pipeline creation pretty easy if your code is in GitHub. After clicking "New Pipeline" in my Azure DevOps project, I select "GitHub" as the source.

The Azure DevOps console automatically takes me to GitHub to select a repository and provide the needed permissions. It also brings in the azure-pipelines.yaml file, as long as I've committed it and pushed it up to GitHub. At this point I can attempt an image build by clicking the "Run" button in the upper right.

The bulk of the build activity occurs in the "CmdLine" step of the job; hopefully it ends with a bunch of push lines, like this:

Now that I have my image available in a repo, I can deploy it to my container runtimes. I generally manage that via Kubernetes. I relied on this blog article by my teammate Mike Gallagher for an example of how to construct a suitable deployment spec. As this example is a Windows MID image, I did have to jump through some hoops to get a Windows nodegroup created and added to my cluster. I also had to add a nodeSelector section in order to have the cluster chose a Windows node, e.g.

nodeSelector:
        kubernetes.io/os: "windows"