Sometimes, using policies is just not enough. Reasons may vary—the number of projects is too big to govern via policies, they become obstacles because you cannot enforce a particular rule, or you find complex designs with them to be just too complicated. For all of those scenarios, Microsoft has prepared an additional tool for Azure administrators called Azure Blueprints. They are like sketches for buildings—you can set collect all required artifacts in one place and use it for multiple deployments. With this feature, you can orchestrate multiple deployments and shorten the time needed to achieve a coherent architecture. If you are familiar with ARM templates, you may find Azure Blueprints much easier to understand as they offer similar functionalities to Resource Manager. On the other hand, it is a great tool for preserving a connection between a blueprint and a deployment or manage multiple subscriptions at once.
Using Azure Blueprints for repeatable deploy and update operations
Note that, at the time of writing this chapter, Blueprints were marked as in Preview. That means that this feature has not reached General Availability (GA) and is not offered full support when used in production.
