In 2014, Microsoft launched a new portal that follows a new model, called the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) model.

This model depends on the concept of resource groups, which means you can group all your resources within a container, resulting in resources being deployed in parallel.

The following diagram describes the resources deployed through the ARM model:

Here are the benefits you will gain by using the ARM model:

• Ability to manage your resources as a group instead of managing them separately.
• Using role-based access control (RBAC) to control access to resources, so that you can assign permissions to a user on a resource or some resources, but not to other resources (as it was in the classic portal).
• Using tags to organize and classify your resources, which can help you with billing. For example, you might want to monitor the billing of some resources that make up a solution, such as a web server. By assigning a tag to the resources that make up that solution, you will be able to monitor the billing.
• Support the use of JSON to deploy resources instead of using the portal:
  • Deploy resources in parallel instead of deploying them sequentially, and wait until each resource deployment finishes to deploy another one.
  • Specify dependencies during resources deployment. For example, a VM will not be created until a storage account and a virtual network gets deployed, because the VM VHD will need a place to be stored in an IP address from a virtual network.
  • Reuse the JSON template to deploy solutions with the same specifications.

For a better understanding of the ARM model, you should consider the following key points:

• Resources with the same life cycle should be gathered in the same resource group
• Resources in different regions can be in the same resource group
• Every resource must be assigned to a resource group, so whenever you want to move a resource between resource groups, you must remove it from its current resource group and then add it to the new resource group
• Resource groups support RBAC, where a user can get access to specific resources, and have no access to the others
• Some resources can be shared across resource groups, such as storage accounts
• Every resource must be assigned to a resource group, so whenever you want to move a resource between resource groups, you must remove it from its current resource group, and then add it to the new resource group