Azure Blueprints

You will be familiar with the word blueprint, which refers to the plan or drawing that is used by an architect to architect a solution. Similarly, in Azure, cloud architects can leverage Azure Blueprints to define a set of repeatable Azure resources that adheres to an organization's standards, processes, and patterns.

Blueprints allows us to orchestrate the deployment of various resources and other artifacts, such as:

Azure blueprint objects are replicated to multiple regions and are backed by Azure Cosmos DB. The replication helps in providing consistent access to resources and maintaining the organization's standards irrespective of which region you are deploying to.

Azure Blueprints comprises various artifacts, and you can find the list of supported artifacts here: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/governance/blueprints/overview#blueprint-definition.

Blueprints can be created from the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, the Azure CLI, REST APIs, or ARM templates.

In the next section, we will look at an example of implementing Azure governance features. Services and features such as RBAC, Azure Policy, and Azure resource locks will be used in the example.