Azure infrastructure creation methods - azure

Question

I'm wondering what is the best way to create and manage an Azure infrastructure. By infrastructure, I mean a set of resources used by a project. E.g. An Application Service Plan, a web service, a SQL server etc.
Currently, I see that there are a couple of ways to do this programmatically in a CD fashion:
By uploading a template with the needed resources
By creating each resource using its own PowerShell Module: E.g. Az.Websites, Az.Sql, Az.IotHub etc.
By using Az CLI, which is approximately the same as 2.
What are the pros and cons of each method?

Answer 1

You can try with azure ARM templates. It support all your mentioned applications to deploy using simple json structure. once you prepared the ARM template you can deploy the template using Azure DevOps release pipeline. for more details check the microsoft documentation
trigger:
- master
pool:
vmImage: 'windows-latest'
steps:
- task: AzureFileCopy#4
inputs:
SourcePath: 'templates'
azureSubscription: 'copy-connection'
Destination: 'AzureBlob'
storage: 'demostorage'
ContainerName: 'projecttemplates'
name: AzureFileCopy
- task: AzureResourceManagerTemplateDeployment#3
inputs:
deploymentScope: 'Resource Group'
azureResourceManagerConnection: 'copy-connection'
subscriptionId: '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000'
action: 'Create Or Update Resource Group'
resourceGroupName: 'demogroup'
location: 'West US'
templateLocation: 'URL of the file'
csmFileLink: '$(AzureFileCopy.StorageContainerUri)templates/mainTemplate.json$(AzureFileCopy.StorageContainerSasToken)'
csmParametersFileLink: '$(AzureFileCopy.StorageContainerUri)templates/mainTemplate.parameters.json$(AzureFileCopy.StorageContainerSasToken)'
deploymentMode: 'Incremental'
deploymentName: 'deploy1'

Answer 2

Basically, when you want to build an infrastructure, all the vehicles you use will do the same job. but the difference is speed and convenience. operations you will do using the interface in a shorter time using the CLI. You can do the If you are working with multiple cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) I recommend using terraform. so you don't need to be knowledgeable about all cloud providers to build the infrastructure.

Answer 3

We suggest using ARM templates for a couple reasons. ARM templates uses declarative syntax, which lets you state what you intend to deploy without having to write the sequence of programming commands to create it. In the template, you specify the resources to deploy and the properties for those resources. ARM templates are more consistent and are idempotent. If you rerun a PowerShell or CLI command numerous times you can get different results. More pros can be found here, I am not going to re-write our docs.
The downside of ARM templates is that they can get complex, especially when you start nesting templates or start using Desired State Configuration. We have recenlty released Bicep (Preview) to reduce some of the complexity.
PowerShell and CLI are pretty similar in the pros/cons but there are times I find one is easier to use (e.g. it's easer to configure Web with CLI but AzureAD needs PowerShell). CLI of course is better is you are running on a non-windows client but now you can run PowerShell in Linux so that is not a hard/fast rule.
The downside with PowerShell or CLI is you must understand the dependencies of your infrastructure and code the script accordingly. ARM templates can take care of this orchestration and deploy everything in the proper order. This can also make PowerShell/CLI slower to deploy resources send they are not deployed in parallel where possible unless you code your script in an async manner.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention Terraform. Terraform is great if you want consistency in deployments across clouds like Azure, AWS and GCP.