Explore templates of existing azure resources

26 Jun 2021

Most development teams, rush through the Azure migration by manually creating all required resources - justifying that the approach would speed-up things. But later they realize the need for maintaining Infrastructure as Code, to replay the different environment creations, for avoiding manual configuration errors, maintenance, scale-up and setup resources on different Azure regions etc.,

For such teams, Microsoft azure portal offers an easier way to export the current resource properties, configurations etc., into ARM templates so that those teams can realize and utilize the benefit from IAC (Infrastructure as Code). Your infrastructure is maintained as just like your source code in your preferred SCM. 

Once your infrastructure is laid as code - things may look to be under control.

But there are situations when you would go-ahead and manually configure certain stuffs like VNet, SSL binding, Custom Domain etc., And later wish to bring in those into the templates. Export templates would help in most situation but there are situations where you wouldn't find the required properties/schema - literally searching entire web to find a solution.

There is rather an elegant way to literally checkout all the template properties and modify your templates accordingly (quite efficient). And even can find certain tags that you can set from your templates based on those property name you can make your template searches much faster.

You can browse entire resources as properties using Azure Resource Explorer.

Make sure to bookmark and remember this site. Because, you'll often forget and literally search of this link and yet you can't find anything about this site existence :).

This resource manager URL just pops up in very few blogs and search results will appear more like a forgotten legend.

Hope this saves you time and make your ARM template searches much quicker ;)