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.