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

Why use modular ARM templates?

Writing a single template consisting of Azure resources is quite common among developers. This is because it is easier and faster to author such ARM templates. However, this comes at a cost. These templates are not reusable, and it is difficult to maintain them. Consider a scenario where other projects might need to create some of the resources that are already in an existing ARM template. They cannot reuse this template before they modify it to suit their requirements. Alternatively, if the ARM templates are divided into multiple subtemplates, each consisting of a single or a few related resources, these sub-templates can be consumed directly by other projects.

A single template is also difficult to maintain. Any changes in the ARM templates need to be verified across all the resources. Deploying a large template is more time-consuming than deploying...