Azure MasterClass: Manage Azure Cloud with ARM Templates

In the past decade, cloud computing has been gaining popularity at a tremendous rate. Some cloud providers are experiencing a growth rate of 50% year over year – which is just astounding. And the reason for this growth is obvious – cloud computing enables ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources which can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal effort. Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications. The Azure Resource Manager, provided by Microsoft Azure, is a versatile service that simplifies how you manage your cloud resources. The Azure Resource Manager can help you define, build and maintain your application in a consistent manner. Within the context of Azure Stack, the Azure Resource Manager is the management layer (API) where you connect to for deploying resources. With Azure Resource Manager (ARM) you can deploy, delete, or update all resources for your solution in a single and coordinated operation by using templates. The templates are in the form of JSON format, and these templates can be used for deployment in different environments such as staging, testing, and production. The Resource Manager helps in providing auditing, security, and tagging features to help you manage your resources post-deployment. Although we have the Azure portal for managing the resources but in cases where you need to maintain and deploy multiple servers, in complex configurations - it might get a cumbersome to handle these deployment and configuration activities via the point and click portal. Moreover remembering every resource category and their respective cost evaluation can become a mammoth task. As companies look forward to automating deployment, scaling, and operations of cloud applications in the Azure cloud (across clusters of hosts), there is a need for providing automated deployment solutions for the cloud infrastructure. With Azure ARM Templates, you can define your infrastructure environment in simple JSON file template. These file templates can be versioned, validated and checked into your source control systems. This is what we call Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC).

What You Will Learn

• Learn how to manage and deploy Azure cloud resources using ARM templates
• Learn about Azure resource manager
• Understand the various sections or components of ARM templates
• Automate Azure IaaS deployments using Azure ARM templates
• Automate Azure PaaS deployments using Azure ARM templates

Audience

Software and IT engineersCloud engineersSoftware architectsDevOps engineersTechnical and non-technical tech founders

About The Author

Manuj Aggarwal: Manuj Aggarwal is an entrepreneur, investor, and technology enthusiast. Over the last few years, he has been a business owner, technical architect, CTO, coder, start up consultant, and more.

Currently, he is the principal consultant, architect, and CTO of a software consulting company, TetraNoodle Technologies, based in Vancouver, Canada. He works with various start-ups on a number of cutting edge and interesting problems. Whether it is ideation and the refining of your start up idea, or building a dream team to execute the idea, he provides a diverse set of solutions that help these start-ups to succeed in their plans.

He has been active in the software industry since 1997, and has worked with early-stage businesses through to Fortune 100 mega-corporations. He is passionate about sharing all the knowledge that he has acquired over the years. He is particularly interested in helping technical and non-technical entrepreneurs, founders, and co-founders of tech start-ups.