Building Code for Deployment Lifecyle: AzureRM Provider vs Azure NoOps

When working with Azure, there are multiple ways to interact with the platform and provision resources. The next sections looks at approaches using the AzureRM provider and leveraging Azure NoOps.

AzureRM Provider

The AzureRM provider is a widely-used method for managing Azure resources using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools using Terraform. It allows you to define your infrastructure and resource configurations in code, providing a declarative way to provision and manage resources.

With the AzureRM provider, you can take advantage of Terraform's rich ecosystem and extensive provider support. It offers a wide range of resources and features, allowing you to create, update, and delete Azure resources with ease.

Azure NoOps

On the other hand, Azure NoOps is a framework that provides a simplified, secure and automated approach to deploying cloud infrastructure in Azure. It offers a set of pre-defined IaC patterns and best practices, enabling you to deploy a well-architected and standardized landing zone and workloads in Azure. It automates the deployment process and incorporates built-in security controls and compliance policies, reducing the time and effort required to set up a secure and compliant cloud infrastructure.

Contrasting Approaches

While both the AzureRM provider and Azure NoOps offer ways to provision resources in Azure, they have distinct differences in terms of complexity, flexibility, and management overhead.

The AzureRM provider provides fine-grained control over your infrastructure and allows you to manage resources using Terraform's powerful features. However, it requires more upfront configuration and maintenance.

On the other hand, Azure NoOps simplifies the provisioning process by abstracting away the infrastructure layer. It offers a more streamlined development experience, but may have limitations in terms of customization and control.

In the following sections, we will explore code samples that demonstrate the usage of both approaches, highlighting their strengths and trade-offs.