11 Using deployment stacks for grouping resources

 

This chapter covers

  • Why you need another mechanism for grouping resources by their lifetime in Azure
  • What deployment stacks are and how you can use them for grouping resources
  • How deployment stacks will replace blueprints, sometime in the future

You have learned all about creating and updating Azure resources through IaC. In a template, you describe how you want your resources to be configured, and the Azure Resource Manager makes it so by creating or updating resources. Up to now, we haven’t paid any attention to removing resources you do not need anymore, except for mentioning the Complete deployment mode in chapter 4.

In chapter 4 you learned that Complete deployments are a powerful but risky method for removing resources you do not need anymore. The risk lies in the fact that they remove all resources in a resource group that are not in the current deployment. If someone else deployed something to the same resource group from another context, those resources would be removed as well. In practice, this risky side of Complete deployments is why they are not frequently used in the real world. Some teams use them in non-production environments, but Complete deployments in production environments are rare. We will revisit this in more detail later in this chapter.

11.1 Grouping resources by their lifetime

11.1.1 Complete deployment mode is not good enough

11.1.2 Deployment stacks to the rescue!

11.1.3 Creating a deployment stack

11.1.4 Updating a deployment stack

11.1.5 Removing a deployment stack

11.2 Provisioning resources for others, but disallowing updates

11.2.1 Azure Blueprints: A first solution

11.3 The future of deployment stacks

Summary

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