Overview of Azure Blueprints
In this, we will understand about Azure Blueprints.
Azure Blueprints makes it possible for development teams to rapidly build and stand up new environments with the trust they’re building within organizational compliance with a set of built-in components. However, blueprints are a declarative way to orchestrate the deployment of various resource templates and other artifacts such as:
- Firstly, Role Assignments
- Secondly, Policy Assignments
- Thirdly, Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates)
- Lastly, Resource Groups
Further, the Azure Blueprints service has back support of the Azure Cosmos DB. Blueprint objects replicate multiple Azure regions. This replication provides low latency, high availability, and consistent access to your blueprint objects, regardless of which region Azure Blueprints deploys your resources to.
How it’s different from ARM templates
The service design to help with environment setup. However, this setup often consists of a set of resource groups, policies, role assignments, and ARM template deployments. A blueprint is a package to bring each of these artifact types together and allow you to compose and version that package. This includes through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.
Nearly everything that you want to include for deployment in Azure Blueprints can be accomplished with an ARM template. However, an ARM template is a document that doesn’t exist natively in Azure.
However, with Azure Blueprints, the relationship between the blueprint definition and the blueprint assignment preserve. This connection supports improved tracking and auditing of deployments.
How it’s different from Azure Policy
A blueprint is a package or container for composing focus-specific sets of standards, patterns, and requirements related to the implementation of Azure cloud services, security, and design that can be reused to maintain consistency and compliance.
A policy is a default allow and explicit deny system focused on resource properties during deployment and for already existing resources. It supports cloud governance by validating that resources within a subscription adhere to requirements and standards.
Blueprint definition
A blueprint is composed of artifacts. Azure Blueprints currently supports the following resources as artifacts:
Blueprint definition locations
When creating a blueprint definition, you’ll define the saving location of the blueprint. Blueprints can save to a management group or subscription that you have Contributor access to. If the location is a management group, the blueprint is available to assign to any child subscription of that management group.
Blueprint parameters
Blueprints can pass parameters to either a policy/initiative or an ARM template. When adding either artifact to a blueprint, the author decides to provide a defined value for each blueprint assignment or to allow each blueprint assignment to provide a value at assignment time.
Blueprint publishing
When a blueprint is first created, it’s considered to be in Draft mode. When it’s ready to assign, it needs to Publish. Publishing requires defining a Version string (letters, numbers, and hyphens with a max length of 20 characters) along with optional Change notes. The Version differentiates it from future changes to the same blueprint and allows each version to assigned. This versioning also means different versions of the same blueprint can assign to the same subscription.
Reference: Microsoft Documentation