Deploying infrastructure using Azure Resource Manager

Before ARM came into existence in 2014, Azure Service Manager (ASM) was used for infrastructure deployments. However, there were some serious drawbacks with the ASM approach arising due to inter-dependencies of resources. Before deploying resources, you had to carefully understand dependencies and sequence the operations accordingly in scripts.

Thankfully, ARM has taken care of the inter-dependency problem to deploy Azure resources easily, uniformly, and seamlessly. ARM uses resource groups as the logical grouping of cloud assets. Using a resource group ensures a consistent life cycle for resource provisioning, security, and tear-offs. ARM uses resource groups as the single unit of deployment and management.

ARM uses templates to deploy IaC. Once created, these templates become part of an enterprise code repository like other types of application code.

Creating ARM templates

An ARM template is simply a JSON format file...