There are quite a few tools on the market that help you implement Azure infrastructure as code. Most likely you heard about Terraform and Pulumi at the conferences and read a bunch of blog posts about how awesome and easy to use they are (and they are actually awesome and easy to use). But what if, for whatever reason, you can't use these tools and the only option available for you is ARM templates?

It’s not a secret that ARM templates are really powerful, but not that easy to work with. This is especially the case if you have complex infrastructure with multiple environments that may have some differences between each other.

At this workshop I will share my experience and tips & tricks on how to implement Azure infrastructure with ARM templates. During the first part of the workshop, you will learn the basics of ARM templates, how to structure them, when and how to use variables and parameters, how to use template functions to simplify multi-environment configuration. I will show you some really useful VS code plug-ins that will dramatically improve your ARM templates development experience.

During the second part of the workshop, you will use the knowledge and experience your learned from the first part and will design and implement simple immutable infrastructure using ARM templates with set of Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines for automated blue/green provisioning and deployment. You will learn what is the difference between classic and YAML based pipelines and why you shouldn't use Azure resource group deployment task at your pipelines.

This workshop is rated level 200-300 with a target audience of developers and architects working with Azure infrastructure.