Azure Policy

In previous sections, I talked about some aspects of governance around compliance requirements, naming standards, and tags, but how do you ensure that users adhere to your requirements? Azure policies provide the guardrails: structured, declarative definitions of the cloud engineer’s intent that is codified that can then become a core element of the environment, enforced by the platform and in real time.

In the previous chapter, in Figure 1.13, I drew out the basics of the Azure Resource Manager and how it relates to key components. I noted some “stuff” to the left of the various components. Some key aspects of that “stuff” related to governance. Figure 2.14 shows a different view of the layers related to the Azure Resource Manager—this time with a focus on governance. You’ll also notice Azure Blueprints, which bring together multiple governance artifacts for pre-active applications, and Azure Resource Graph, which brings...