Azure Infrastructure as Code

1 Infrastructure as Code

This chapter covers

• Working with infrastructure
• The benefits of Infrastructure as Code
• The difference between Azure Service Management and Azure Resource Manager
• Other Infrastructure as Code tools available for Azure

If you have worked with Microsoft Azure before, you may have managed infrastructure in one way or another. In Azure, just as in any cloud platform, infrastructure can be created and altered quickly and easily. Using one or more of the Azure portal, PowerShell cmdlets, RESTful HTTP calls, SDKs, or ARM templates, you can create servers or PaaS and SaaS services in minutes or even seconds. This is in contrast to how infrastructure was managed in the past, or often still is on-premises.

The unique proposition ...