Modifying an ARM template

ARM templates are used to define infrastructure that needs to be deployed in Azure, which is also often referred to as IaC. One of the benefits of ARM templates is the ability to deploy resources rapidly via code with a level of consistency as opposed to an Azure engineer needing to deploy resources via the Azure portal, which might introduce misconfigurations when repeating tasks. It is also useful to view deployment history.

ARM templates make use of the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format to define the resources. To deploy ARM templates, there are two JSON files of importance:

• Template file: This is the main file and has sections to define parameters, variables, user-defined functions, resources, and outputs.
• Parameters file: This file can be on its own and linked to the template file, which is usually done when there are many parameters used in complex deployments.

The following is how the ARM template schema looks when empty...