Azure Resource Provisioning Offerings

• Numerous native Azure services, tools, and guidance enable the provisioning of resources, which underpin solutions deployed in Azure.
• The offerings enable repeatable processes to deploy resources to meet customer requirements for development and production scenarios.
• Development teams and IT administrators have different use cases for provisioning resources, and some of the offerings cater to the needs of these separate roles.
• New offerings continue to arrive, so customers should evaluate their benefits and be wary that older offerings could be deprecated, requiring process changes and retraining.

Solutions deployed in Azure run upon resources, such as VMs and databases, that customers provision. The provisioning process can be performed using baseline Azure tools, such as the Azure portal, CLI, PowerShell cmdlets, and REST APIs. However, several higher-level offerings aggregate, templatize, and abstract resource creation, updating, and deletion. These offerings can simplify the execution of repeatable processes for provisioning resources while enhancing governance, reducing unnecessary costs, and minimizing security vulnerabilities.