ARM Templates

As you know, IaC is an infrastructure-agnostic term. Each cloud, including Microsoft, has its own way of implementing IaC; Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates is the Azure way.

Although you can use various other tools like Terraform to provision and manage Azure resources using an IaC approach, ARM templates is the system built by Microsoft specifically for Azure.

Now, you’re going to learn Infrastructure as Code (IaC) the Microsoft way with ARM templates.

ARM templates: Infrastructure as Code

What is an ARM template? Think of an ARM template as a description of how your Azure resources should look. Templates are JSON files built with a specific schema that dictates how to describe each Azure resource you’d like to build. Unlike building Azure resources with a script, for example, you don’t tell Azure how to build the resources. You simply tell it what to build by building a template; ARM then takes care of the rest.

When the templates are built, you will then deploy that template to a resource group known as an ARM deployment. The deployment then reads the template ...