Prep Work and ARM Template Structure Breakdown

Within my first post, I laid the foundation to build upon as you get yourself up to speed on how ARM Templates can be plugged into Infrastructure as Code) IaC workflows and infrastructure buildouts. As part of this series of blog posts, I will put together a list of materials and links to content that will help deepen your understanding even further. It’s hard to capture everything in a series of blog posts, so going the extra mile and providing additional reading + video material will hopefully keep unblocking your learning on into the future. Additionally, I welcome any emails (shannon.kuehn@gmail.com) or social media messages you may have as you embark upon your journey at getting better acclimated with ARM Templates. Lastly, you can also get in touch with your pals at Skylines Academy (admin@skylinesacademy.com) for any questions. Basically, no question is “dumb,” so we welcome any opportunity to help you dig as deep as possible.

“So now what?” you may find yourself asking. Well, we’ll need to have some sort of text editor installed. Anything from Visual Studio, to Visual Studio Community, to Visual Studio Code, to Sublime, to Notepad++, etc. If you’re a hardcore Linux guru, you could even use VIM! Basically, we need something so we can examine the syntax inside the ARM Templates themselves (P.S. You will not want to edit your templates using regular Notepad). Rather than reinvent the wheel here, I’ll refer you to a few links/tutorials for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Note, I will focus on Visual Studio over the course of the remaining blog posts, so it may make sense to start there from an installation point. The reason for this choice is directly related to the engineering involved with plugging into some of the pre-existing templates so you don’t start from scratch. Please examine the links below. If you do not like these text editors, you can search around online for the right way to install your text editor of choice. Once you have a text editor installed, please move forward to the next section that discusses all the different components of an ARM Template.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio Download

Install Visual Studio Tutorial

Shannon’s Notes: The biggest caveat here is Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise requires an active subscription (i.e. an active Visual Studio, a.k.a. MSDN, subscription). You can use the trial version, however if you do not have an active Visual Studio subscription, I would recommend the Visual Studio Community Edition (which is free). You can find both editions in the first download link.