A resource group in Azure is a set of resources that represent a logical group. You can deploy and delete all the resources inside a group at once. Azure resource manager is a tool that's used to help you manage your resource groups. In line with the spirit of infrastructure as code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_code), Azure provides a resource manager template, which is a file in JSON format that defines the configuration and the dependencies of the desired resources. Users can deploy the template to multiple resource groups for different environments repeatedly and consistently.
Let's see how these things look in the Azure portal. First, you'll need to have an Azure account. If you don't have one, go to https://azure.microsoft.com/features/azure-portal/ and sign up to get a free account. The Azure free account offers you 12 months of popular free services and $200 credit for 30 days. Credit card information is needed for account registration, but you won't be charged unless you upgrade your account type.
After logging in, click on Create a resource on the sidebar and go to Get started. We'll see a web app there; click on it and input the app name. For resource creation, you'll need to specify the Resource Group. We can either use an existing one or create a new one. Let's create a new one for now, as we don't have any resource groups yet. Change the Runtime Stack to your application runtime if needed. The screenshot for this is as follows:
At the bottom of the page, beside the Create button, there is an Automation options button. If we click that, we'll see that a resource template is created automatically. If we click Deploy, the custom parameters defined by the template will be shown. For now, we will just click on Create directly. Here is a screenshot of the resource template:
After clicking Create, the console will bring us to the following view for us to explore. Let's go to our newly created resource group, devops-app, under the Recent resources tab:
In this resource group, we can see that there's one application running in the App Services and one service plan. We can also see lots of functionalities in the sidebar. The resource group aims to give users a comprehensive view of a group of resources, so we don't need to go to a different console to find them:
If we click on the devops-app Resource group, it'll bring us to the app service console, which is the PaaS offering in Azure:
At this point, the sample web app has been deployed to the Azure app service. If we visit the endpoint specified in the URL (which in this case is https://devops-app.azurewebsites.net/), we can find it:
We could also upload our own web app, or integrate with our version control software, such as GitHub or Bitbucket, and build our whole pipeline with Azure. For more information, please visit the deployment center page (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/deploy-continuous-deployment).
We can also easily delete resource groups in the Resource groups console:
After confirmation, the related resources will be cleaned up:
