One of the most useful aspects of a platform like Azure is the multitude of deployment options that are available. Which one you use may be down to familiarity, efficiency or sometimes nature of deployment. In this post I will discuss ARM templates which can greatly speed up your deployment cycle.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the management of infrastructure (networks, virtual machines, load balancers, etc.) in a descriptive model. It functions best when using the same versioning that your DevOps team uses for source code. Similar to the principle that the same source code generates the same binary, an IaC model generates the same environment every time it is applied. Therefore, it is very beneficial to reducing deployment times as well as simplifying how resources are deployed.

An ARM template is a JSON file, in its simplest form it must contain the following definitions:

• schema
• content version
• resources

For more deployment options it can also include the following:

• parameters
• variables
• outputs

In general, your templates will include all of the above, this ensures the greatest level of customisation to the deployment as and when needed. Without getting too much into the technicalities of each aspect, the file will contain everything needed to build all the objects you have defined. For example, if the file builds a VM you will define the name, size, NIC used, OS profile and disk options. You have multiple choices within each definition to greater customise your deployment and these definitions can be passed as direct referrals, variables or parameters.

One thing to note, is that while these templates deploy resources via code, they cannot configure the resources. To automate that, you must consider a technology like DSC or Powershell once the template completes deployment.

JSON files are not simple to read, I deliberately haven’t included a sample as they are easier to understand as you build one. The fact that they aren’t simple makes error checking somewhat problematic. Most code editing applications that support ARM plugins will catch basic formatting errors. You can also verify the file via Azure Powershell. If you really want to confirm your template works it is best to test the deployment properly. Ideally, you could make use of a test/dev subscription to minimise costs but once the template completes, you can delete the entire resource group quite quickly.

To best understand how these templates can be of use, start with one of the simple quick start templates from Github, for example, a simple Windows server deployment – https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/master/101-vm-simple-windows

You can then build layer upon layer of code on top of this to increase the complexity of the deployment or use one of the other samples that closer matches your intention.

For more reading, I would recommend starting with understanding the structure and syntax before moving onto the actual templates themselves here.