Using Azure for Infrastructure as Code – Overview & Tools

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a method of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable script files rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. It offers benefits such as achieving repeatable, automated results, improving efficiency, consistency, and reliability. IaC tools include Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Pulumi, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, Azure Bicep, and AWS CloudFormation. These tools use declarative configuration languages to define infrastructure components, dependencies, and configurations. Azure provides native support for IaC through services like ARM templates and Azure Bicep. Other popular tools that integrate well with Azure include Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, Pulumi, Chef, and SaltStack. Each tool has its own pros and cons, so it's essential to choose the one most appropriate for your needs. To use IaC on Azure, you need to define infrastructure in configuration files, store them in a version control system (VCS), deploy your infrastructure, and update or destroy it as required by changing the configuration files and re-running your deployment. Azure offers native support for IaC through ARM templates and Azure Bicep, while Terraform also supports Azure providers. In this article, we have provided examples of configuration files using different tools that create the same infrastructure: a resource group with a VNET that includes a subnet with an NSG attached to the subnet. We have also discussed best practices for IaC on Azure, such as version control, separation of concerns, parameterization, resource naming conventions, tagging, environment consistency, immutable infrastructure, security best practices, testing, monitoring and logging, secrets management, CI/CD, governance, documentation, education and training.