Most days, you want to spend as little time as possible on how you deploy an application environment and get on with actual deployment. In many IT environments, there’s a movement toward development and operations teams that collaborate and work closely together, with the DevOps buzzword being thrown around a lot at conferences and in blogs.
There’s nothing inherently new or groundbreaking about the DevOps culture, but often, different teams didn’t work together as they should. Modern tools have spurred the DevOps movement, with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) solutions that can automate the entire deployment of application environments based on a single code check-in by a developer. The operations team is usually the one that builds and maintains these CI/CD pipelines, which allows much quicker tests and deployments of application updates for developers.
The Azure Resource Manager deployment model is central to how you build and run resources, even though you probably haven’t realized it yet. Resource Manager is an approach to building and deploying resources as much as the automation processes and templates that drive those deployments. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use Resource Manager features such as access controls and locks, consistent template deployments, and automated multitier rollouts.