Many resources combine to provide a complete Azure service for your applications. These include virtual machines (VM), your storage account, web apps, databases, and your virtual network (VLAN). Originally, when you managed an Azure environment you created, deployed, and managed each of these separately. When adjustments needed to be made, you went to the required consoles and manually made those changes. When you wanted to replicate your solution in another Azure environment, you painstakingly recreated everything.
The introduction of ARM in 2014 changed all that, mainly by providing resource groups, which are defined by Microsoft as “A container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. The resource group can include all the resources for the solution, or only those resources that you want to manage as a group. You decide how you want to allocate resources to resource groups based on what makes the most sense for your organization.”
Now all the required resources could be managed as a group which saves tremendous time and effort. Dependencies between resources can be defined to assure that they are deployed in the correct order and inconsistent relationships with each other. Resources can be tagged for logical organization, which also helps clarify billing and costs on your subscription.
Another great advantage coming from ARM is the ability to create templates which can then be used to replicate your environment for repeat deployment for QA, UAT, and live rollout, knowing that your resources will be consistently deployed. Since Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is natively integrated, access control can easily be applied to all services in your resource group.
Hanu Professional Services helped one client, a global leader in the hospitality industry, deploy infrastructure for core IT projects in hours instead of weeks or months.
Perhaps the most important value created by the introduction of resource groups is the flexibility to be able to change resources and structure relatively easily without breaking any services. Please feel free to send any questions you may have about Azure to me at rjackson@us.hanu.com.
