Azure Deployment Environments is a new service that allows developers to quickly and easily create and deploy app infrastructure environments with project-based templates. Microsoft announced the service at Build 2022 a year ago with support for Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.. At Build 2023 this week, the company said the service is now leaving preview and becoming generally available.
Azure Deployment Environments provides the following benefits to creating, configuring, and managing environments in the cloud:
- Standardization and collaboration: Capture and share IaC templates in source control within your team or organization and ensure consistent environments across different stages of development. Promote InnerSource and share best practices, tips, and tricks across teams.
- Compliance and governance: Dev infra teams can define specific Azure deployment configurations per project and per environment type, such as sandbox, testing, staging, or production. Apply enterprise security policies and track resource usage across dev centers and projects.
- Self-service and productivity: Developers can deploy preconfigured environments for any stage of the development cycle, right from where they work. They can also spin up sandbox environments to explore Azure or test their code. Integrate with CI/CD pipelines for seamless deployment.
How does Azure Deployment Environments work?
Azure Deployment Environments works by enabling dev infra teams to create a project-based, curated set of reusable IaC templates that developers can use to deploy environments. The dev infra teams can also define the types of environments that developers can create, such as sandbox, testing, staging, or production. Each environment type has a predefined subscription and a set of Azure governance policies applied to it.
“By enabling self-service deployment by developers, Azure Deployment Environments also benefits development infrastructure teams, eliminating redundant work while giving them centralized control to keep environments secure and cost effective,” says Sagar Lankala, Senior Product Manager, Developer Division
“Rather than repeatedly provisioning environments for different developers, admins provide developers with a catalog of standardized, pre-approved templates, promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing. Admins can also predefine which roles can deploy which types of environments—whether dev, test, staging, or production—and ensure they’re deployed in the right subscription or management group with all the policies and cost controls that entails.”
Developers can then choose an environment type and a template from a custom portal, the CLI, or their code repository, and deploy the environment with a few simple steps. The service uses a specific managed identity to perform the deployment on behalf of the developer.
