MMS • Steef-Jan Wiggers
Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ
During the recent Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure Deployment Environments. This managed service enables dev teams to quickly spin up app infrastructure with project-based templates to establish consistency and best practices while maximizing security, compliance, and cost-efficiency.
Setting up environments for applications that require multiple services and subscriptions in Azure can be challenging due to compliance, security, and possible long lead time to have it ready. Yet, with Azure Deployment Environments, organizations can eliminate the complexities of setting up and deploying environments, according to the company, which released the service in a private preview earlier this year.
Organizations can preconfigure a set of Infrastructure as Code templates with policies and subscriptions. These templates are built as ARM (and eventually Terraform and Bicep) files and kept in source control repositories with versioning, access control, and pull request processes. Furthermore, through Azure RBAC and Azure AD security authentication, organizations can establish comprehensive access controls for environments by the project- and user types. And finally, resource mappings ensure that environments are deployed to the correct Azure subscription, allowing for accurate cost tracking across the organization.
In a Tech Community blog post, Sagar Chandra Reddy Lankala, a senior product manager at Microsoft, explains:
By defining environment types for different stages of development, organizations make it easy for developers to deploy environments not only with the right services and resources, but also with the right security and governance policies already applied to the environment, making it easier for developers to focus on their code instead of their infrastructure.
Environments can be deployed manually through a custom developer portal, CLI, or pipelines.
Azure Deployment Environments are an addition to the existing services, such as CodeSpaces and Microsoft Dev Box the company made available earlier to enhance developer productivity and coding environments. CodeSpaces allows developers to get a VM with VSCode quickly, and similarly, with Microsoft Dev Box, they can get an entire preconfigured developer workstation in the cloud.
Amanda Silver, CVP of the Product Developer Division at Microsoft, tweeted:
Minimize environment setup time and maximize environment security and compliance with Azure Deployment Environments. Now in public preview! Game changer for platform engineering teams.
More details of Azure Deployment Environments are available on the documentation landing page. Pricing-wise, the service is free during the preview period, and customers will only be charged for other Azure resources like compute storage and networking created in environments.