ARM Templates vs Terraform After working with ARM templates for the last 3 months, I feel that Terraform is a much better solution. ARM Templates Yes, ARM Templates are native. But…. There’s no way to run a dry run test to see what you’re about to do, or break! Writing single purposed ARM Templates that can be reused in your organization is very difficult. There’s no way to publish them There’s no tool to resolve dependencies between templates Debugging is hard Slow feedback from ARM engine az validate doesn’t mean it will deploy Error messages are hard to understand Finding where in the JSON file you’re missing that [ or ], or , is super painful Terraform Terrform has a large community.

Observe your customers Recently, my team has been building some automation for another team. This week we’ve run some workshops and received feedback about it. Most of the time they would tell us if something was wrong, didn’t meet their requirements or expectations. However, one of my team observed that when people followed the README.md, they scrolled up and down the file trying to follow the instructions. So he took the initiative to make some adjustments.

Small Batch Sizes I was reading the final chapters of The DevOps Handbook. And I had a flash back to my first job - a paper boy. Every week I would collect large piles of advertising materials, fold them up and deliver them to 200+ houses. It was quite an effort to complete all that work, and I wanted to be efficient. I remember seeing somebody else’s method for folding.