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Azure SDK for Python: Retrieve Virtual Machine Image Details

holger

holger

Posted on January 13, 2023

Azure SDK for Python: Retrieve Virtual Machine Image Details

The Azure SDK for Python includes capabilities that allow users to retrieve Virtual Machine image details, such as the publisher names, offers, SKUs and the image details itself. [4] I was reading a thread on Stack Overflow and got interested in this functionality - and here is the corresponding write-up.

The corresponding library is the Azure Management Compute library which includes the ComputeManagementClient class which in turn has a function called virtual_machine_images.list. [1][2] However, this function requires further parameters:

  • location
  • publisher_name
  • offer
  • skus

Except for location, we may not have all the required details at hand to retrieve the image details. Further relevant functions include:

  • list_publishers - which has location as a required parameter
  • list_offers - which requires location and publisher_name
  • list_skus - which requires location, publisher_name and offer parameters

Now that looks like a few for-loops would be helpful until we could finally list all VM images. But would we even want this? Maybe. Given that there are thousands of images available in each region, maybe rather not as it would take a significant amount of time. So, maybe build our own function to be flexible?

Let's try and go through this step by step and take a look at each of those functions.

First, we would need the appropriate Azure SDK for Python libraries for authentication and compute management:

from azure.identity import AzureCliCredential
from azure.mgmt.compute import ComputeManagementClient
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We'd need to define our Credentials, Subscription ID and Azure Location.

my_credential = AzureCliCredential()
my_subscription_id = "{subscription-id}"
my_location = "{azure-location}"
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Now we could create the client and collect the list of Publishers.

compute_client = ComputeManagementClient(credential=my_credential, subscription_id=my_subscription_id)
img_publishers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_publishers(location=my_location)
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At this point, if we were to display the content of the img_publishers variable, it would show loads of objects:

[...<azure.mgmt.compute.v2022_08_01.models._models_py3.VirtualMachineImageResource object at 0x7fb8d85c0790>, <azure.mgmt.compute.v2022_08_01.models._models_py3.VirtualMachineImageResource object at 0x7fb8d85c07c0>, <azure.mgmt.compute.v2022_08_01.models._models_py3.VirtualMachineImageResource object at 0x7fb8d85c07f0>, <azure.mgmt.compute.v2022_08_01.models._models_py3.VirtualMachineImageResource object at 0x7fb8d85c0820>, <azure.mgmt.compute.v2022_08_01.models._models_py3.VirtualMachineImageResource object at 0x7fb8d85c0850>, <azure.mgmt.compute.v2022_08_01.models._models_py3.VirtualMachineImageResource object at 0x7fb8d85c0880>...]
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Just to get an idea of how many publishers there are (I used northeurope as Azure location):

>>> len(img_publishers)
1871
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Let's just pick one randomly, to see what details are contained within these objects:

>>> print(img_publishers[1200])
{'additional_properties': {}, 'id': '/Subscriptions/{subscription-id}/Providers/Microsoft.Compute/Locations/northeurope/Publishers/MicrosoftSQLServer', 'name': 'MicrosoftSQLServer', 'location': 'northeurope', 'tags': None, 'extended_location': None}
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The item of interest seems to be the name. We can now use that to go further and query the corresponding offers that belong to this publisher. Let's stick to above example in order to keep it simple for the moment.

offers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_offers(location=my_location, publisher_name=img_publishers[1200].name)
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Let's see how many offers are there from MicrosoftSQLServer:

>>> len(offers)
37
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We'll again pick one of them to see what properties might be important - and it's, again, name.

>>> print(offers[36])
{'additional_properties': {}, 'id': '/Subscriptions/{subscription-id}/Providers/Microsoft.Compute/Locations/northeurope/Publishers/MicrosoftSQLServer/ArtifactTypes/VMImage/Offers/sql2022-ws2022', 'name': 'sql2022-ws2022', 'location': 'northeurope', 'tags': None, 'extended_location': None}
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Next stop: SKUs

skus = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_skus(location=my_location,publisher_name=img_publishers[1200].name, offer=offers[36].name)
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Telling by the length of the list, there are only four SKUs for this particular offer:

>>> len(skus)
4
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And picking one of them reveals that, again, the name property is what we need.

>>> print(skus[0])
{'additional_properties': {'properties': {'automaticOSUpgradeProperties': {'automaticOSUpgradeSupported': False}}}, 'id': '/Subscriptions/{subscription-id}/Providers/Microsoft.Compute/Locations/northeurope/Publishers/MicrosoftSQLServer/ArtifactTypes/VMImage/Offers/sql2022-ws2022/Skus/enterprise-gen2', 'name': 'enterprise-gen2', 'location': 'northeurope', 'tags': None, 'extended_location': None}
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Since we now have everything together we can finally call the list() function.

images = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list(location=my_location, publisher_name=img_publishers[1200].name, offer=offers[36].name, skus=skus[0].name)
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We now have identified 2 images:

>>> len(images)
2
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And from that we can get an idea about what the outcome will be:

>>> print(images[0])
{'additional_properties': {}, 'id': '/Subscriptions/{subscription-id}/Providers/Microsoft.Compute/Locations/northeurope/Publishers/MicrosoftSQLServer/ArtifactTypes/VMImage/Offers/sql2022-ws2022/Skus/enterprise-gen2/Versions/16.0.221025', 'name': '16.0.221025', 'location': 'northeurope', 'tags': None, 'extended_location': None}
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Picking items from the individual lists is a) not much fun and b) does not scale very well. As next step we might want to wrap some for-loops around these.
So, let's take a step back and assume we were back at a point where we imported our libraries and defined my_credential, my_subscription_id and my_location variables. We would also have created the ComputeManagementClient and dumped the list of publishers into the img_publishers variable.

from azure.identity import AzureCliCredential
from azure.mgmt.compute import ComputeManagementClient

my_credential = AzureCliCredential()
my_subscription_id = "{subscription-id}"
my_location = "{azure-location}"

compute_client = ComputeManagementClient(credential=my_credential, subscription_id=my_subscription_id)
img_publishers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_publishers(location=my_location)
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From here on we could iterate through the Publishers, Offers, SKUs and finally Images.

for publisher in img_publishers:
    offers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_offers(location=my_location, publisher_name=publisher.name)
    for offer in offers:
        skus = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_skus(location=my_location,publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name)
        for sku in skus:
            images = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list(location=my_location, publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name, skus=sku.name)
            for image in images:
                print(image)
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It shouldn't take long for us to see some results on screen (cancelled the processing using CTRL-C, otherwise this would take ages to get all the images):

...
{'additional_properties': {}, 'id': '/Subscriptions/{subscription-id}/Providers/Microsoft.Compute/Locations/northeurope/Publishers/aod/ArtifactTypes/VMImage/Offers/win2019azpolicy/Skus/win2019azpolicy/Versions/0.0.1', 'name': '0.0.1', 'location': 'northeurope', 'tags': None, 'extended_location': None}
{'additional_properties': {}, 'id': '/Subscriptions/{subscription-id}/Providers/Microsoft.Compute/Locations/northeurope/Publishers/aod/ArtifactTypes/VMImage/Offers/win2019azpolicy/Skus/win2019azpolicy/Versions/0.0.3', 'name': '0.0.3', 'location': 'northeurope', 'tags': None, 'extended_location': None}
{'additional_properties': {}, 'id': '/Subscriptions/{subscription-id}/Providers/Microsoft.Compute/Locations/northeurope/Publishers/apigee/ArtifactTypes/VMImage/Offers/apigee-edge/Skus/apigee-edge-4-15-07/Versions/1.0.0', 'name': '1.0.0', 'location': 'northeurope', 'tags': None, 'extended_location': None}
{'additional_properties': {}, 'id': '/Subscriptions/{subscription-id}/Providers/Microsoft.Compute/Locations/northeurope/Publishers/apigee/ArtifactTypes/VMImage/Offers/apigee-edge/Skus/apigee-edge-private-cloud/Versions/4.16.05', 'name': '4.16.05', 'location': 'northeurope', 'tags': None, 'extended_location': None}
...
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While this works, it might not be very helpful for further processing. We might want to add the details to a custom dictionary? If so, the loops could be put out like this:

for publisher in img_publishers:
    offers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_offers(location=my_location, publisher_name=publisher.name)
    for offer in offers:
        skus = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_skus(location=my_location,publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name)
        for sku in skus:
            images = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list(location=my_location, publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name, skus=sku.name)
            for image in images:
                image_dict = dict({
                    'publisherName' : publisher.name,
                    'offerName' : offer.name,
                    'skuName': sku.name,
                    'imageName': image.name
                })
                print(image_dict)
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The dictionary would look something like this (again CTRL-C'd after a few seconds to stop the processing as it would take too long):

...
{'publisherName': 'aod', 'offerName': 'win2019azpolicy', 'skuName': 'win2019azpolicy', 'imageName': '0.0.1'}
{'publisherName': 'aod', 'offerName': 'win2019azpolicy', 'skuName': 'win2019azpolicy', 'imageName': '0.0.3'}
{'publisherName': 'apigee', 'offerName': 'apigee-edge', 'skuName': 'apigee-edge-4-15-07', 'imageName': '1.0.0'}
{'publisherName': 'apigee', 'offerName': 'apigee-edge', 'skuName': 'apigee-edge-private-cloud', 'imageName': '4.16.05'}
...
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If we wanted to add those individual dictionary to a large one to process in the end, we could append the image details rather then printing them out on screen.

results = []

for publisher in img_publishers:
    offers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_offers(location=my_location, publisher_name=publisher.name)
    for offer in offers:
        skus = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_skus(location=my_location,publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name)
        for sku in skus:
            images = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list(location=my_location, publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name, skus=sku.name)
            for image in images:
                image_dict = dict({
                    'publisherName' : publisher.name,
                    'offerName' : offer.name,
                    'skuName': sku.name,
                    'imageName': image.name
                })
                results.append(image_dict)
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This would still run a very long time though. So maybe we would want to add some query functionality? Let's create a function.

def get_vm_images(credential, subscription_id, location, image_publisher):
    results = []

    compute_client = ComputeManagementClient(credential=credential, subscription_id=subscription_id)
    img_publishers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_publishers(location=location)

    for publisher in img_publishers:
        if image_publisher in publisher.name:
            offers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_offers(location=location, publisher_name=publisher.name)
            for offer in offers:
                skus = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_skus(location=location,publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name)
                for sku in skus:
                    images = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list(location=location, publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name, skus=sku.name)
                    for image in images:
                        image_dict = dict({
                            'publisherName' : publisher.name,
                            'offerName' : offer.name,
                            'skuName': sku.name,
                            'imageName': image.name
                        })
                        results.append(image_dict)
        else:
            pass
    return results
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By checking whether the value of image_publisher (which we pass to the function) is part of the publisher.name value, we could make sure that only if there is a match, Images would be queried and added to the results dictionary: if image_publisher in publisher.name.

We could try this:

>>> get_vm_images(credential=my_credential, subscription_id=my_subscription_id, location=my_location, image_publisher="canonical")
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Hm, we get nothing:

[]
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So, maybe capitalization matters.

>>> get_vm_images(credential=my_credential, subscription_id=my_subscription_id, location=my_location, image_publisher="Canonical")
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And indeed, this seems to work better:

[...{'publisherName': 'Canonical', 'offerName': 'UbuntuServer', 'skuName': '19_10-daily-gen2', 'imageName': '19.10.202006110'}, {'publisherName': 'Canonical', 'offerName': 'UbuntuServer', 'skuName': '19_10-daily-gen2', 'imageName': '19.10.202007020'}, {'publisherName': 'Canonical', 'offerName': 'UbuntuServer', 'skuName': '19_10-daily-gen2', 'imageName': '19.10.202007030'}, {'publisherName': 'Canonical', 'offerName': 'UbuntuServer', 'skuName': '19_10-daily-gen2', 'imageName': '19.10.202007070'}, {'publisherName': 'Canonical', 'offerName': 'UbuntuServer', 'skuName': '19_10-daily-gen2', 'imageName': '19.10.202007080'}, {'publisherName': 'Canonical', 'offerName': 'UbuntuServer', 'skuName': '19_10-daily-gen2', 'imageName': '19.10.202007090'}, {'publisherName': 'Canonical', 'offerName': 'UbuntuServer', 'skuName': '19_10-daily-gen2', 'imageName': '19.10.202007100'}]
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So, something else to account for I presume... since there might be multiple variations. Maybe some publishers are typed all lowercase, others require capitalization - we could replace above if-clause (I'm sure there are more elegant ways though) by: if image_publisher.lower() in publisher.name or image_publisher.capitalize() in publisher.name:

The function code would now look like this

def get_vm_images(credential, subscription_id, location, image_publisher):
    results = []

    compute_client = ComputeManagementClient(credential=credential, subscription_id=subscription_id)
    img_publishers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_publishers(location=location)

    for publisher in img_publishers:
        if image_publisher.lower() in publisher.name or image_publisher.capitalize() in publisher.name:
            offers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_offers(location=location, publisher_name=publisher.name)
            for offer in offers:
                skus = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_skus(location=location,publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name)
                for sku in skus:
                    images = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list(location=location, publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name, skus=sku.name)
                    for image in images:
                        image_dict = dict({
                            'publisherName' : publisher.name,
                            'offerName' : offer.name,
                            'skuName': sku.name,
                            'imageName': image.name
                        })
                        results.append(image_dict)
        else:
            pass

    return results
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With this in place, we should be able to get results even when passing something like canonical instead of Canonical.

Now we have this very basic function in place. This could be used in various ways. I.E. to produce json output...

import json

canonical_images = get_vm_images(credential=my_credential, subscription_id=my_subscription_id, location=my_location, image_publisher="canonical")
print(json.dumps(canonical_images))
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[ ... {"publisherName": "Canonical", "offerName": "UbuntuServer", "skuName": "19_10-daily-gen2", "imageName": "19.10.202006110"}, {"publisherName": "Canonical", "offerName": "UbuntuServer", "skuName": "19_10-daily-gen2", "imageName": "19.10.202007020"}, {"publisherName": "Canonical", "offerName": "UbuntuServer", "skuName": "19_10-daily-gen2", "imageName": "19.10.202007030"}, {"publisherName": "Canonical", "offerName": "UbuntuServer", "skuName": "19_10-daily-gen2", "imageName": "19.10.202007070"}, {"publisherName": "Canonical", "offerName": "UbuntuServer", "skuName": "19_10-daily-gen2", "imageName": "19.10.202007080"}, {"publisherName": "Canonical", "offerName": "UbuntuServer", "skuName": "19_10-daily-gen2", "imageName": "19.10.202007090"}, {"publisherName": "Canonical", "offerName": "UbuntuServer", "skuName": "19_10-daily-gen2", "imageName": "19.10.202007100"}]
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...or to load into a Pandas DataFrame:

import pandas as pd

canonical_images = get_vm_images(credential=my_credential, subscription_id=my_subscription_id, location=my_location, image_publisher="canonical")
df = pd.DataFrame(canonical_images)

print(df)
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>>> print(df)
     publisherName                                     offerName           skuName        imageName
0        Canonical  0001-com-ubuntu-confidential-vm-experimental             18_04   18.04.20210309
1        Canonical  0001-com-ubuntu-confidential-vm-experimental        18_04-gen2   18.04.20210309
2        Canonical  0001-com-ubuntu-confidential-vm-experimental             20_04   20.04.20210309
3        Canonical  0001-com-ubuntu-confidential-vm-experimental        20_04-gen2   20.04.20210309
4        Canonical         0001-com-ubuntu-confidential-vm-focal     20_04-lts-cvm  20.04.202111100
...            ...                                           ...               ...              ...
4546     Canonical                                  UbuntuServer  19_10-daily-gen2  19.10.202007030
4547     Canonical                                  UbuntuServer  19_10-daily-gen2  19.10.202007070
4548     Canonical                                  UbuntuServer  19_10-daily-gen2  19.10.202007080
4549     Canonical                                  UbuntuServer  19_10-daily-gen2  19.10.202007090
4550     Canonical                                  UbuntuServer  19_10-daily-gen2  19.10.202007100

[4551 rows x 4 columns]
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Finally, here is the full script for testing. I've added an additional if-clause so that the function would also accept None as image publisher - however, this is not recommended really as it takes a lot of time.

from azure.identity import AzureCliCredential
from azure.mgmt.compute import ComputeManagementClient

def get_vm_images(credential, subscription_id, location, image_publisher=None):
    results = []

    compute_client = ComputeManagementClient(credential=credential, subscription_id=subscription_id)
    img_publishers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_publishers(location=location)

    if image_publisher:
        for publisher in img_publishers:
            if image_publisher.lower() in publisher.name or image_publisher.capitalize() in publisher.name:
                offers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_offers(location=location, publisher_name=publisher.name)
                for offer in offers:
                    skus = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_skus(location=location,publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name)
                    for sku in skus:
                        images = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list(location=location, publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name, skus=sku.name)
                        for image in images:
                            image_dict = dict({
                                'publisherName' : publisher.name,
                                'offerName' : offer.name,
                                'skuName': sku.name,
                                'imageName': image.name
                            })

                            results.append(image_dict)
            else:
                pass
    else:
        for publisher in img_publishers:
            offers = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_offers(location=location, publisher_name=publisher.name)
            for offer in offers:
                skus = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list_skus(location=location,publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name)
                for sku in skus:
                    images = compute_client.virtual_machine_images.list(location=location, publisher_name=publisher.name, offer=offer.name, skus=sku.name)
                    for image in images:
                        image_dict = dict({
                            'publisherName' : publisher.name,
                            'offerName' : offer.name,
                            'skuName': sku.name,
                            'imageName': image.name
                        })

                        results.append(image_dict)

    return results


my_credential = AzureCliCredential()
my_subscription_id = "{subscription-id}"

get_vm_images(credential=my_credential, subscription_id=my_subscription_id, location="eastus", image_publisher="Canonical")
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I hope this might be helpful for someone who wants to test and try the Azure SDK for Python - I certainly enjoyed looking into it. Let me just add a few bullet points:

  • Above code samples are just for fun and learning and should not be used in production since there are a lot of important things missing such as error-handling and logging.
  • There are surely more elegant ways of doing the same with Python.
  • The Azure CLI is capable of listing all images out of the box: az vm image list --all

That's it for the moment - thanks for reading.

References

# Title URL Accessed-On
1 azure-mgmt-compute 29.0.0 https://pypi.org/project/azure-mgmt-compute/ 2023-01-12
2 VirtualMachineImagesOperations Class - list https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/python/api/azure-mgmt-compute/azure.mgmt.compute.v2022_08_01.operations.virtualmachineimagesoperations?view=azure-python#azure-mgmt-compute-v2022-08-01-operations-virtualmachineimagesoperations-list 2023-01-12
3 azure-identity 1.12.0 https://pypi.org/project/azure-identity/ 2023-01-13
4 Use the Azure libraries (SDK) for Python https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/developer/python/sdk/azure-sdk-overview 2023-01-12
5 VirtualMachineImagesOperations Class - list_publishers https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/python/api/azure-mgmt-compute/azure.mgmt.compute.v2022_08_01.operations.virtualmachineimagesoperations?view=azure-python#azure-mgmt-compute-v2022-08-01-operations-virtualmachineimagesoperations-list-publishers 2023-01-12
6 VirtualMachineImagesOperations Class - list_offers https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/python/api/azure-mgmt-compute/azure.mgmt.compute.v2022_08_01.operations.virtualmachineimagesoperations?view=azure-python#azure-mgmt-compute-v2022-08-01-operations-virtualmachineimagesoperations-list-offers 2023-01-12
7 VirtualMachineImagesOperations Class - list_skus https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/python/api/azure-mgmt-compute/azure.mgmt.compute.v2022_08_01.operations.virtualmachineimagesoperations?view=azure-python#azure-mgmt-compute-v2022-08-01-operations-virtualmachineimagesoperations-list-skus 2023-01-12
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holger
holger

Posted on January 13, 2023

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