Infrastructure as Code

If you’ve ever created anything in Azure, you’d know there’s either a lot of clicking or a lot of typing going on. To provision, anything in Azure requires remembering which screen to go to or what command to run. If you’re just playing around and trying to learn Azure, that’s fine. But once that playing turns into business-critical, production processes where time is money, then something has to change.

Once your organization starts to get serious about cloud infrastructure, you’re going to be facing a lot of new challenges. You’ll encounter unnecessary duplication of work, repeated cases of fat-finger syndrome, change management issues, configuration drift, and more. The larger the organization and team, the larger the problems.

You’ll see a full breakdown of how Azure handles this challenge in the next chapter. But, before we can get into ARM templates, it’s important to first understand an umbrella term that ARM templates fall under called Infrastructure as Code (IaC) ...