Arm

When you begin to operationalize your deployments and want to add monitoring one of the things you might do is to create shared dashboards as part of your deployment. A shared dashboard is basically the same as a non-shared dashboard except it is a full Azure resource, lives in a resource group and can be created through ARM.

Both development and production environments are deployed in a fully automated fashion using ARM templates. As part of these deployments we also create Notification Hubs and related authorization rules.

For automatic deployment of test environments we are spinning up App Service instances and want to automatically set connection strings for the database and other services in the same template.

Deploying resources and workloads at scale requires a healthy amount of automation. Automation helps to deliver consistent and repeatable results. I’ve tried to categorize some of the technology and provide some pointers to areas of application and pros and cons.

A colleague of mine, Tyler Ayers, has written a pretty neat Azure Function that tracks changes made to Azure Resource Manager Providers (ARM) and show these changes in a timeline.

In February I had the chance to attend a session by Yuri Diogenes, Program Manager at Microsoft, on how Azure Security Center works and how to demo it in a real life scenario.

Photo by Matt Artz on Unsplash In many scenarios there is the requirement to enrich or lookup data with meta information from the infrastructure. In this scenario a file with machine, location and other meta information was placed during deployment on the VM for both Azure and AWS.