David Rendón - Building Applications with Azure Resource Manager (ARM): Leverage IaC to Vastly Improve the Life Cycle of Your Applications

Cloud-native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.

As a system administrator, what strategy would you follow to design a cloud-native app? What set of patterns would you leverage to deploy and scale a reliable cloud-native system while considering speed and agility as core principles?

System administrators initially think about how to solve the need to be scalable in the cloud since that is the principle that they have been taught to incorporate and that they have had success in delivering in the datacenter. In other words, they feel comfortable creating cloud-native applications that are scalable. However, scalability should be tied to how agile we can make resources available to stakeholders.

You need to look for ways to better provision the cloud environments where your systems will run and rapidly deploy new features and updates to your application.

Early in the design process of your cloud-native system, a focus on both of these core principlesspeed and agilitysubstantiates your proposals value for the teams across your organization, including operations and development.

So, how can you adopt practices that can help you reduce the time to make the infrastructure resources available for your cloud-native systems? More importantly, how can you keep consistency across testing and versioning of those environments?

Welcome to Building Applications with Azure Resource Manager (ARM), where youll learn to leverage the infrastructure-as-code approach to vastly improve the life cycle of your applications, lowering the cost and time to deploy and increase in agility for your organization.

Writing a book is always a new adventure. Our journey on this project began in Orlando, Florida, at the Orange County Convention Center, where I met with Joan Murray of Apress. We had actually met before, but this was our first in-person meeting. I was surprised and delighted when she agreed to work on this project.

Since then, Joan and her team have helped me through all the publishing processes to ensure you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. The Apress team, Joan, and I worked closely together to navigate each step and refine the chapters and examples. The experience of working with Joan and her team was nothing less than outstanding. This project would have remained a relic of wishful thinking if not for Joan Murray, Jill Balzano, and John Folberth, who encouraged me to make it a reality.

In fact, this project wouldnt have been possible without the support of many people. To enumerate the entire cast of friends, colleagues, and mentors who have contributed ideas to this book despite these challenging years would amount to writing another book.

On a personal level, I would like to thank Peter De Tender, Michael Jimenez, Andrew Redman, Omar Avils, Juan Carlos Ruiz, Francisco Corona, and Glauter Jannuzzi for providing guidance and for the benefit of their professional advice.

My most profound debt is owed to my family for the understanding, inspiration, drive, and support that you have given me, especially to my son, Andr, for bringing joy into my life. I wish you all the best that this life can bring and may you always know you are treasured and loved.

-David Rendn