I am pleased to announce the release of Azure Building Blocks, a set of tools and Azure Resource Manager templates that are designed to simplify deployment of Azure resources. Azure Resource Manager templates are very powerful, yet at the same time can be very complicated to author and maintain. With Azure Building Blocks, you don't need to author any templates. You only need to specify the parameter settings for the resources you want to deploy. These parameters settings are then merged with best practice defaults and deployed using the azbb command line tool.

Azure Building Blocks currently support the following resources:

• ​Virtual Networks (including gateways and peering)
• Network Security Groups
• User Defined Routes
• Windows and Linux VMs
• VM Extensions
• Internal and External Load Balancers
• Application Gateway

Infrastructure as Code

Azure Building Blocks enables you to manage your deployment in a simple, declarative way. Your parameter files can sit side-by-side with your application's code. The Azure Building Block command line tool can be integrated into your deployment pipeline.

Simplifying Resource Deployment

For example, the parameters to deploy three identical VMs: 

“type”: “VirtualMachine”,

“settings”: {

    “vmCount”: 3,

    “osType”: “windows”,

    “namePrefix”: “test”,

    “adminPassword”: ““,

    “nics”: [{“subnetName”: “web”}],

    “virtualNetwork”: {“name”: “ra-vnet”}

}

The Azure Building Blocks command line tool merges the following best practice defaults when it deploys the VMs to Azure:

• Enables diagnostics on all VMs.
• Deploys the VMs in an availability set.
• All VM disks are managed.
• The operating system is the latest Windows Server 2016 image (or latest Ubuntu 16.04 image for Linux).
• Public IP created for each VM.

Placing the VMs in a scale set is as easy as specifying one more parameter:

“type”: “VirtualMachine”,

“settings”: {

    “vmCount”: 3,

    “osType”: “windows”,

    “namePrefix”: “test”,

    “adminPassword”: ““,

    “nics”: [{“subnetName”: “web”}],

    “virtualNetwork”: {“name”: “ra-vnet”},

    “scaleSetSettings”: {}

}

Getting Started

To get started, clone the Azure Building Blocks repository on Github and install the Azure Building Blocks command line tool. You can even install in Azure Cloud Shell. Learn how to create your own parameter file, then learn how to create larger and more complex architectures by going through our tutorials. The tutorials are currently being written, but keep checking back as more are added.

Now go deploy some stuff to Azure!