An overview of Azure Blueprints

The Discussion

• 

  Navigations shows Dashboard>Blueprints
  meanwhile that is not possible to find in marketplace, dashboard or preview portal

• 

  Blueprints are not in the marketplace, but they can be found by searching in the universal search in the nav bar, or by searching in "All Services" which you can find in the left nav

• 

  To maintain infrastructure as code, the ARM templates are normally stored in some source control like GitHub.
  
  Specifying the ARM template manually, looks a tedious manual process. Is there anyway to directly integrated this with source control?
  

• 

  Take a look at the "Managing Blueprints-as-code" guide in the show notes. There is a cmdlet called Import-AzureBlueprintArtifact that you can use to automatically add the necessary syntax to use an existing ARM template into a blueprint template artifact. This can be used to create a CI system that does what you describe. Feel free to reach out if you have more questions at alfran[at]microsoft[dot]com
  
  There is also an item in the Governance UserVoice tracking suggesting this: https://feedback.azure.com/forums/915958-azure-governance/suggestions/36820765-blueprints-should-use-azure-template-library-artif

• 

  Azure Blueprints uses which deployment mode(by-default)?
  
  - Full
  - Difference
  - Verify Only
  
  

• 

  @Nayan:
  ARM templates are deployed in Incremental mode. The only other option would be "Complete" mode. Not sure what you are referring to with "Full", "Difference" and "Verify Only".
  
  Policy Assignments, Role Assignments and Resource Groups are created via direct REST API PUT calls.

• 

  Is there a way to create a blueprint from an environment you have already created?

• 

  I've tried multiple times to generate outputs (even just static strings) from artifacts. When i try to reference them from other artifacts ("[artifacts ('<name-of-the-artifact>').outputs.nameOfTheOutput"]"), I always get the error the artifact didn't generate any output. Do you have any working example?

• 

  @Alberto:
  
  Alberto - here is a full end-to-end guide of passing outputs between artifacts:
  https://github.com/azure/azure-blueprints#passing-values-between-artifacts
  
  Make sure you are getting the artifact name correct, which by default will be the name of the artifact JSON file. If you need to feel free to open up a support case and they can help you troubleshoot.

• 

  Why is this is still in preview after all this time, any plan for this to be GA?
  Doesn't inspire confidence in using this as a deployment tool...

• 

  2 hours ago, ianphilip
  wrote

  Why is this is still in preview after all this time, any plan for this to be GA?
  Doesn't inspire confidence in using this as a deployment tool...
  

  
  
  We are planning to have Blueprints take a dependency on new resource types called Template Specs and Deployment Stacks. Template Specs will replace blueprint definitions, and blueprint assignments will be replaced by Deployment Stacks. Stacks should be available in private preview in the next month, at which point we will publish some documentation on what this migration is going to look like in more depth. Once the migration path is enabled, we will GA Blueprints, but it will largely be a User Experience that takes a dependency on these new underlying component.
  
  Apologies for the confusion, but feel free to reach out for more info at alfran@microsoft.com