Making sense of ARM templates: What they can do for you

Azure Resource Manager templates are familiar to many Azure professionals, however, developing templates can be tedious at times. For newcomers to Azure and those with a business rather than technical understanding of the Microsoft cloud, references to "ARM templates" can be a bit confusing. In this article, I will give a brief explanation of what ARM templates are all about.

Simply put, an ARM template is just a declarative document that tells Azure what you want. You indicate that you want a resource in a resource group with a certain level of security and IP addresses. This is all set up in JSON format, defining VM, compute, and database sections. You list out of all of the resources you need all the way down to who has access and IP addressing. "I want this database set up, I want this hard drive." This may seem like a lot of work and it can get very detailed. The advantage is that one you  create it, it can  be  used again and again. The greatest strength of ARM templates is that the templates can be used to deploy hundreds or thousands of servers instead of having to constantly deploy operating systems. The templates can be used to setup whole environments.