Infrastructure as Code and Configuration Management

Welcome, readers, to the world of Azure Cloud, Azure Resource Manager (ARM), and ARM templates. Azure Cloud is growing in  leaps and bounds and has good acceptability within enterprises. Azure Cloud provides a very performance-centric, scalable, and reliable Azure Resource Manager platform for management and governance of our deployments. To create resources on Azure, ARM templates are preferred over other mechanisms because of their inherent advantages. These advantages are mentioned throughout this book.

ARM templates have become an essential skill for any serious development on Azure, and writing reusable effective ARM template is sought after by many organizations. The Azure DevOps paradigm, to a large extent, also depends on ARM templates for its automation requirements.

In this first chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Configuration management
• Infrastructure as code
• Understanding ARM templates
• Designing ARM template
• A primer on JSON
• Introducing Azure Resource Manager