ARM templates

A prominent advantage of IaC is that it can be version controlled. It can also be reused across environments, which provides a high degree of consistency and predictability in deployments, and ensures that the impact and result of deploying an ARM template is the same no matter the number of times the template is deployed. This feature is known as idempotency.

ARM templates debuted with the introduction of the ARM specification and have been getting richer in features and growing in maturity since then. It's important to understand that there's generally a feature gap of a few weeks to a couple of months between the actual resource configuration and the availability of the configuration in ARM templates.

Each resource has its own configuration. This configuration can be affected in a multitude of ways, including using Azure PowerShell, the Azure CLI, Azure SDKs, REST APIs, and ARM templates.

Each of these techniques has its own development and release...