ARM is the successor of ASM. Although both platforms are operational and available as of writing this chapter, Microsoft is moving toward using ARM as a platform for all future deployments.
ASM has inherent constraints and some of the major ones are discussed here:
- ASM deployments are slow and blocking. Operations are blocked if an earlier operation is already in progress.
- Parallelism is a challenge in ASM. It is not possible to execute multiple transactions successfully in parallel. The operations in ASM are linear and executed one after another. Either there are parallel operation errors or they will get blocked.
- Resources in ASM are provisioned and managed in isolation from each other. There is no relation between ASM resources. Grouping of services and resources, configuring them together is not possible.
- Cloud services are the unit of deployment in ASM. They are reliant on affinity groups and not scalable due to its design and architecture.
- Granular and discreet...