Every deployment comprises two stacks of resources:

• Environment or infrastructure resources
• Application deployment

Infrastructure resources refer to hardware, software, and platform resources that make an environment suitable for application deployment. For example: infrastructure resources might contain hardware resources, such as networks, load balancers, network interface cards, physical server, virtual machines, network connectivity, an operating system, as well as platform resources, such as container runtime, and framework deployments, such as .NET core. Each of these infrastructure resources should be configured in a way that ensures the application will work according to its design.

After infrastructure resource-provisioning, the application is deployed on top of them. These are related to resources such as application binaries, application...

Infrastructure as Code is one of the important facets of configuration-management systems. Generally, an environment is provisioned using manual efforts, such as using a self-service portal or wizard that provides step-by-step directions to configure a resource. It might go a step further and the environment can be provisioned using scripts, such as PowerShell and Bash. These scripts can then execute either manually or automatically using an orchestrator tool.

There are some serious limitations in using any of the previously mentioned approaches:

• Lack of repeatability, consistency, and predictability during provisioning and updating environments. The configuration values for scripts are either entered manually by copying from documents and Excel sheets.
• Lack of diagnostic information and it's difficult to figure out the exact error location.
• Human...

ARM templates are JSON files and they enable Infrastructure as Code for Azure Cloud Platform. ARM templates help to provision and configure resources in a predictable, consistent, and repeatable manner.

ARM templates help in the following ways:

• Specifying resources and their configurations in a declarative manner. There is no scripting involved in provisioning resources.
• Providing intent and what should be provisioned by defining the resources rather than how to deploy the resources.
• Offers idempotent deployments by ensuring that the end state of the deployment is always consistent and predictable. This means that even during incremental deployments, the end state will remain consistent. It also means that templates deployed over and over will not change the end result, and environments will be equivalent when used to create multiple environments.
• Orchestrates...

ARM templates are one of the foundational pillars for the successful deployment of solutions on Azure. Authoring the right set of ARM templates—that are modular, reusable, and generic—is the first major task for ARM templates. The other aspect is the management and governance of these ARM templates. It is absolutely crucial to design the ARM template in a way that it can evolve over a period of time as well as be managed effectively.

The process for designing an ARM template is as follows:

• Identification of resources: This is the first step when designing ARM templates for a solution; it involves the identification of resources and their count. There are many resources that provide similar features; however, there are differences between them. It is advised to read the fine print of those resources before selecting them for the solution.
...

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight data-representation and interchange format. It is a text-based and human-readable format that is easy to read, comprehend, and update. Many people think of JSON as a programming language or a markup language; however, it is neither. It is a pure representation of data in text format.

Prior to JSON, XML was the preferred data-exchange format and JSON has few similarities with it. Like XML, JSON is self-describing. It is quite easy to understand the intent of a JSON document by just reading through it. Also, like XML, it can create complex as well as nested objects. It is hierarchical, and objects can be composed of child objects and arrays. However, the similarities end here. JSON documents are terser and much more compact compared to XML documents. As a result, they are also much more reader-friendly. The...

Azure Resource Manager, also popularly known as ARM, is the successor of Azure Service Management and is the new management framework that helps in provisioning, managing, monitoring, and governing Azure Resources.

The ARM framework helps to provision resources. The entire framework is highly scalable, performance-centric, and comprises multiple internal components. These components are not directly visible to users, but they help implement modularity and reusability within the overall architecture.

Here is the ARM architecture:

Here is the same architecture using examples of resource providers and types:

We will be referring to this architecture not only in this section but also throughout...

This chapter provided information about foundational concepts related to Azure Cloud, ARM, and ARM templates. Infrastructure as Code is a relatively new paradigm and should be adopted by enterprises to automate the process of provisioning environments. They also help in making Azure DevOps effective and efficient. ARM templates help to provision environments using a declarative approach. This helps to define the environment using JSON language and provides numerous ways to deploy them.

ARM provides an extensible and performant framework to manage, provision, and govern resources. We covered these topics in detail and provided a basic primer on JSON – the language of ARM templates.

We will start exploring ARM templates in more detail from the next chapter onward, and will cover the tools needed to create, deploy, and write basic ARM templates.