What is ARM & Revolutionizing the cloud deployment

Use Azure cloud ARM Spin up a web application/Sql Server/SQL Database and storage account in azure within 10 seconds  

                Early web developers knows how painful is to set up a web application in IIS and make it work because IIS behaves crazy when your day is bad. Azure has made the life of every web application developer's life so easy by creating the web application in just a few clicks and your website is public and available to internet user, which is not easy in IIS in any sense. And we don’t even have to talk about deploying the web application which has a load balancer. 

                With the Presence of ARM – Azure Resource manager, setting up a Web application, SQL Server, SQL Database and storage manager is only a configuration JSON and which can be created by the visual studio as a template, and deployed using visual studio !

You can spin up a new web application (even VM’s) with any resource (web-app, SQL server etc.) and you can also update the already ARM created resources.

                Let us look out how we can setup a Web application, a SQL Server, SQL Database and azure storage Account in seconds. 

In Visual studio 2015, create a new project and select the azure resource group template.

You need to select the Azure Template with WebApp + Sql from the next window that appear after clicking ok.

Once we click on OK, project is created will have only three files as below.

Three files are 

• Deploy-AzureResourceGroup.ps1 
• WebSiteSQLDatabase.json 
• WebSiteSQLDatabase.parameters.json

We will look in detail about each and every file and see how these files helps us to create azure resources stack in matter of seconds.

Deploy-AzureResourceGroup.ps1

This file is used by the visual studio to create the application in azure and it is nothing but a power shell script. It runs the command needed to create the application using the JSON, provided as input. It will be same for any azure resource group project, irrespective of resource you choose to be deployed.

WebSiteSQLDatabase.parameters.json

                This files contains the parameter that can be used to configure the resources of the azure, this can be configured to have default values.  (Parameters section of WebSiteSQLDatabase.json file will be configuring the type of parameter used, default values etc.)

Empty Template contains following elements, will look like below.

WebSiteSQLDatabase.json

 

                This file provides the resources information that needs to be installed in the cloud, it has own variables that can be used declared and used inside the JSON file where we don’t want to repeat the logic for creating a string or any other object that can be reused. For more details about the every element you refer here . We will discuss the template further to understand the resources.

Empty Template contains following elements

{

   "$schema": "http://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",

   "contentVersion": "",

   "parameters": {  },

   "variables": {  },

   "resources": [  ],

   "outputs": {  }

}

Every resource will have entry in the resources section and it will have its own configuration detail. For explanatory purpose, we will only look into the web application alone. For more details, look into my code repository in GitHub. 

Above JSON explains the web app that will be created from the above JSON, you can see the variables are set at runtime based on the parameter value, which can be altered by us in the configuration. 

The current template from the visual studio has only WebApp+SQL, when we need to add one more resource, in our case it is storage manager, we need to add through the another cool feature in Visual studio called as JSON Outline. 

You can open this window from other window in view menu. Open the WebsiteSQLDatabase.JSON before opening the JSON Outline. 

You can add the storage account by right clicking the resources in the JSON Outline and selecting ‘Add new resource’.  Select the Storage account and name it. 

Once we click add the below JSON will be added to the WebSiteSQLDatabase.JSON. Make sure you provide the name of the storage account in lower case letter.

You are all set with the configurations to create a web application, an SQL Server, an SQL Database and Azure Storage Account. Will not take more than 2 minutes to create a solution with these configuration using visual studio. 

You can also get lots of pre-existing template that is already available in GitHub. You can download any template or refer them to create more resource such as redis cache, mongo db, spin up a new Linux virtual machine. 

You can now deploy the ARM to azure to create the specified resources. 

You will see the deploy to resource group window where we can Edit Parameters that can be configured for our ARM, which can also be saved to the WebSiteSQLDatabase.parameters.json

Once you click on the deploy button, you need to watch the output window because the visual studio does everything at the background while running Power-Shell script.

 

  You can see after couple of minutes when you login into azure you can see the new resource group that was created as all the specified resources created automatically. 

ARM helps to create scripts to automate the resource creation process in azure cloud so we can do automate testing, add new web application to the new client it can also deploy the code automatically to the cloud. You should really try this in azure since it is the coolest feature in azure.