Deploying Azure functions using ARM templates

So far, we have been manually provisioning Azure functions using the Azure portal. Although it's easy to work with the portal, this approach has a number of disadvantages:

1. It is not easy to view the history of all the changes made to any service.
2. In large projects with hundreds of services, replicating the infrastructure across new environments is not easy (in one of my engagements, we have more than 500 services). If customers ask to create a new environment (for instance, an Alpha environment), which should be similar to our production, then it might take weeks to create.

In order to resolve these challenges, it's a best practice to automate the process of infrastructure provisioning. Azure has a solution for this in the form of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.

ARM templates are JSON-based files where you can define the resources that you want to be created. You can add these ARM templates to source...