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

ARM template functions

Functions are units of code execution that are made up of multiple statements. Functions help to improve the reusability of code by encapsulating statements into reusable nuggets that can be invoked or called from multiple places. Azure ARM templates provide multiple functions to make the authoring of advanced templates both easy and versatile.

The output of an ARM template is always deterministic, meaning that no matter the number of times a template is executed or deployed, the end output will always be the same. It is for this reason that functions available with the ARM template do not provide functions based on randomness, date and time, or any other non-deterministic variable.

Almost all programming languages have functions as one of their important constructs. Functions are categorized to accept parameters from a caller and then return output after...