What are Azure Blueprints?

By Joe Carlyle, Principal Azure Solution Architect at Evros Technology Group and owner of wedoAzure

I’m sure most of you have seen recent announcements relative to Blueprints as well as multiple Microsoft posts about the service and what it can do to improve your environments. However, what if you’re not sure about what they are and if they are usable for your environment? Hopefully, that’s where this post comes in. I’m going to explain exactly what they are and why you might use an Azure Blueprint. This should allow you to make a decision on whether you need them or not.

Following on from that, I think that’s the first basic point about Azure Blueprints. Similar to several other new services in Azure, the functionality is great and could help progress a lot of environments, but that doesn’t mean they help, or are even useful in a lot of other environments. Never feel guilt-ed into using a new service because there is a “buzz” about it at launch. Assess the service, understand it, assess it’s usability versus your requirements then TEST TEST TEST! Don’t forget, Blueprints are still in preview so no production workloads yet.

So, what is an Azure Blueprint? To try explain it plainly, it is a collection of governance and resource services, defined in such a way to allow you to repeat deployments to a set standard.

The collection of governance and resource services within a Blueprint are referred to as Artifacts. Within each Blueprint, you can make use of any combination of the following:

Resource	Hierarchy options	Description
Resource Groups	Subscription	Create a new resource group for use by other artifacts within the blueprint. This enables you to organize resources and provides a scope for other artifacts.
Azure Resource Manager template	Subscription, Resource Group	Templates are used to create resources. This could range from individual deployments to entire environments.
Policy Assignment	Subscription, Resource Group	Allows assignment of a policy or initiative to the subscription and/or resource group the blueprint is assigned to. Anyparameters are assigned at creation of the blueprint or during blueprint assignment.
Role Assignment	Subscription, Resource Group	Role assignments can be defined for the entire subscription or nested to a specific resource group included in the blueprint.

 

As you can see above, artifacts can be deployed/assigned at different levels. However, the Blueprint itself must be located in either a subscription you have at least Contributor access to or a Management Group. If located within a Management Group the Blueprint is available to any of the child subscriptions of that group.

When defining your Blueprint, several artifact options allow you to choose parameters that are passed from Blueprint to artifact. For example, when defining a Resource Group, you can choose to specify the name and location. You don’t have to specify these parameters within the Blueprint, you can also allow these to be passed when the Blueprint is assigned.

Once you have your Blueprint defined, your next step is to publish it. When publishing, you must indicate a version. I found it odd that this isn’t restricted in some way, you can literally name one version “1.0” and the next “B” so I’d recommend adding notes with each version and try to stick to a pattern. However, it makes sense if you’re going to use different versions for different assignments (I’ll explain that next), so choose relative to your requirements.

When your Blueprint is published, you can then assign it. A nice feature is the ability to assign different versions of a Blueprint to different subscriptions. For example you could have two versions of a Blueprint, that have different artifact definitions (think test version and production version) assigned to different subscriptions. They can be independently updated too.

At assignment, there are some options to chose as well as subscription. They are Resource Locking and Managed Identity.

For Managed Identity, it’s recommended you simply choose System Assigned as the Blueprints service will then manage the security lifecycle. More on Managed Identities to help you understand and choose what’s right for your environment.

The Resource Locking feature really allows you to maintain control of your governed deployment. If you’re not familiar with Resource Locks, check out this post. The familiar status applies to resources deployed by a Blueprint assignment:

• Not locked
• Read Only
• Cannot delete

However, once a status is applied, not even a user/object with the Owner role can modify it. This is due to how these statuses are applied. An RBAC deny assignments deny action is applied to artifact resources during assignment of a blueprint if the assignment selected the Read Only or Do Not Delete option. The deny action is added by the managed identity of the blueprint assignment and can only be removed from the artifact resources by the same managed identity.

So, how do you edit or delete your resources? Update your Blueprint to “Not locked” and push the update to the relevant assignment. This method prevents unwanted and unexpected changes occurring outside of the scope of the Blueprint.

There is quite a learning curve for Blueprints I think as they combine several other services you must be familiar with, so for me, you have to start there. Understand each of the artifacts fully so you can see how they may work well if defined in your environment.

Recently, sample Blueprints have been released to allow you to deploy governed pre-designed environments with a couple of clicks, one sample is the ISO27001 Shared Services which I think is good to help understand the service, even if it might be slightly complex for your first test.

Again, Blueprints are still in Preview. So be as cautious as always with your production environments. I look forward to seeing what changes come with GA, which shouldn’t be much longer considering Blueprints were announced back at Ignite. I will update this post relevant to GA when it happens.

As always, if you have questions, leave a comment, mail me, or ping me on Twitter!

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 17, 2019
  Thanks for this very useful although and Blueprints are something we have not used yet.
• Anonymous
  April 19, 2019
  Thanks for Posting