Book Image

Azure Resource Manager Templates Quick Start Guide

By : Ritesh Modi
Book Image

Azure Resource Manager Templates Quick Start Guide

By: Ritesh Modi

Overview of this book

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are declarations of Azure resources in the JSON format to provision and maintain them using infrastructure as code. This book gives practical solutions and examples for provisioning and managing various Azure services using ARM templates. The book starts with an understanding of infrastructure as code, a refresher on JSON, and then moves on to explain the fundamental concepts of ARM templates. Important concepts like iteration, conditional evaluation, security, usage of expressions, and functions will be covered in detail. You will use linked and nested templates to create modular ARM templates. You will see how to create multiple instances of the same resources, how to nest and link templates, and how to establish dependencies between them. You will also learn about implementing design patterns, secure template design, the unit testing of ARM templates, and adopting best practices. By the end of this book, you will understand the entire life cycle of ARM templates and their testing, and be able to author them for complex deployments.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: ARM Template Foundational Skills
6
Section 2: ARM Template Advanced Concepts

Use parameters sparingly

There is a general tendency to add a parameter to every property related to resource configuration. Although it makes the template highly generic, it comes with a cost. ARM templates do not have many features for validating an incoming parameter. An ARM template can conduct basic checks in terms of the length of the parameter and whether or not it is mandatory. The users will not always know the appropriate values for some of these parameters.

Parameters should be defined only for those configurations that affect the size of the environment, the types of resources created, the cost of the environment, security-related information, and data that is needed to configure the resources.

As an example of the parameters for the environment size, we can have a Large, Medium, or Small environment. Based on the value, the appropriate SKU and the size of a resource...