Azure Resource Manager Templates (ARM Templates)
One of the more compelling features offered by Azure is Azure Resource Manager Templates (ARM Templates).
Why ARM Templates
From Microsoft’s website:
With the move to the cloud, many teams have adopted agile development methods. These teams iterate quickly. They need to repeatedly deploy their solutions to the cloud, and know their infrastructure is in a reliable state. As infrastructure has become part of the iterative process, the division between operations and development has disappeared. Teams need to manage infrastructure and application code through a unified process.Developers may easily script infrastructure.
Think of all those time-consuming operations needed to take in order to shift your infrastructure as changes were made. Add a website. Update the DNS.
To meet these challenges, you can automate deployments and use the practice of infrastructure as code.ARM templates are a means to turn infrastructure into code.
What Happens when an ARM Template is run
An ARM Template is given to the Resource Manager.
To know more about the Resource Manager and how it can be queried from PowerShell read:
The Resource Manager, in turn, converts each ARM Template into a set of, operations, it validates them, it sorts them and turns them into HTTP Calls performed against the different Resource Providers :
To know more about each resource provider read:
Getting Started
The most basic ARM Template one may think of would be:
How to run an ARM template is well detailed in:
References on the syntax and the different properties of the created resources may be found at:
A library full of quick start ARM Templates may be found at:
Authoring Tools
ARM Templates come with great extensions for VSCode:
Of course, Visual Studio does support them as well:
Summary
ARM Templates are a great resource to unleash your developer potential and having them get more done with less.
