Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) to Software Defined Infrastructure using Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

As the scale of cloud infrastructure is augmenting, so is the number of instances that needs to be provisioned. As a result, there is a requirement for automating the process of managing infrastructure instances to facilitate development, staging, and production environments. The purpose of this paper is to understand `Infrastructure as a code' (IaC) in relation to Software Defined Infrastructure. Using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates we will demonstrate the benefit and importance of IaC by deploying a web application on Microsoft Azure using only code. The use of ARM templates was found to increase the agility of the deployment and management process. We will also demonstrate IaC using Terraform and Pulumi. The paper also discusses the correlation of IaC with the concept of code reusability and repeatability.