Az - ARM Templates / Deployments

👉 Overview

👀 What ?

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates are the deployment and configuration service provided by Microsoft Azure. They provide a consistent way to create, update, or delete resources in Azure by defining the infrastructure and configuration for your Azure solution.

🧐 Why ?

ARM Templates are important as they allow us to define, deploy, and maintain Azure resources in a declarative manner. This means, instead of manually clicking through the Azure portal or running scripts to create resources, we define what we want and ARM takes care of how to achieve it. This infrastructure as code approach solves the problem of managing complex Azure environments and makes Azure resource deployment more predictable, repeatable, and less error-prone.

⛏️ How ?

To use ARM Templates, you first need to create a JSON file that defines the resources you want to deploy to Azure. This JSON file is the ARM template. You can then deploy the ARM template using the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell. A typical ARM template will have four main sections: parameters (input values for the template), variables (values that are used within the template), resources (the Azure resources to create), and outputs (values that are returned after deployment).

⏳ When ?

Microsoft introduced ARM and ARM Templates in 2014 as part of their Azure Resource Management model. It was aimed at solving the challenges of deploying and managing Azure resources. It has since become a fundamental part of Azure DevOps practices.

⚙️ Technical Explanations

At a technical level, ARM templates are simply JSON files that describe the resources and properties needed for an application. The ARM service in Azure interprets the templates and translates the JSON syntax into REST API operations against the resources defined. ARM Templates can deploy resources to a resource group, a subscription, a management group, or a tenant. They use a declarative syntax, meaning you describe your intended deployment without having to write the sequence of programming commands to create it. This approach simplifies complex deployments, reduces errors, and increases efficiency in deploying Azure resources.