Kenneth H
Kenneth H Visionary Technology Leader

Azure Governance with Azure Quickstart Templates

Azure Governance with Azure Quickstart Templates

Azure Quickstart Templates allows you to deploy Azure resources through the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) with community contributed templates. Azure Resource Manager allows you to provision your applications together with various Azure Services using a declarative template. In a single template, you can deploy multiple services along with their dependencies.


How to use Azure Quickstart Templates?

You can find Azure Quickstart Templates on Github!

With ARM capabilities, these are some of the most requested features for Azure Government. This enables the modern management of many more of your cloud resources. The ARM deployment offers much more granular control of our access and permission. This allows enterprise configurators or engineers to be able to build templates quicker for deployment and ease up the deployment timing as compared to traditional hosting where it could take days if not weeks to deploy an application with many services running such as SQL DB, Redis Cache, Network Security etc.


There are 2 ways to go about deploying a template.

  1. Deploy using the Quickstart Templates provided by the community
  2. Deploy a custom template with customized services

Deployment Options

Most of the quickstart templates come with a “Deploy to Azure” button that allows a one-click deployment to Windows Azure.

Deploy with Powershell

Once you are logged into Azure, you can deploy the templates under Resource Group Template Deploy

Deploy with Custom Templates

You could also deploy your own template to Azure. You could start a blank template provided by Microsoft here. The template consists of 3 files (the blank template provides without Powershell deployment):

  1. deploy.ps1
  2. azuredeploy.json
  3. azuredeploy.parameters.json
  4. metadata.json

“deploy.ps1”

This is a Powershell script to execute the deployment with the templates provided. It consists of your resource group name, subscription ID, and location.

“azuredeploy.json”

This file consists of the resources and services you would like to put together for your deployment. For example, you could indicate that you would like a Storage account, Network Security Group, Virtual Machine, and App Service to be spinned up.

“azuredeploy.parameters.json”

This file consists of the parameters to your resources. For example, the resource group, name of the resource, location of the resource, pricing tier etc.

“metadata.json”

This file consist of the template’s metadata information.


This should provide a quick overview of what Azure Templates could achieve with Azure Resource Manager. This helps companies to have granular control and permission over Azure resources and its applications, yet at the same time, ensuring different degree of compliance on Azure.


Cheers!

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