Blank ARM template starter kit
I've noticed that quite often it's hard to start developing your ARM templates so that you're at the same time preparing for the deployment automation from the beginning. Sure there are many templates available and web is full of blogs that show different details of ARM templates but many times you have to think that "how does this land into my codebase so that it's still manageable and at least basics are well in-place". Many of my customers have been struggling with this topic and I decided to create "Blank ARM template starter kit" to (hopefully) ease the pain of getting started.
Idea of the Blank ARM template starter kit is simple. Provide solid starting point for your ARM template development. This is fully aligned with the target of automating this in your VSTS build and release pipelines. This lets you first worry on the resources to add to your template and secondly only worry how to further improve you deployment automation. So no need to start from scratch!
I tried to explain everything in https://github.com/JanneMattila/000-BlankApp but just to give short recap about it. First grab a copy of the repository as zip and then start taking these starter files into use. Typical development workflow for your ARM template development follows this pattern:
- Create Git repository (or use existing if you have one)
- Commit Blank ARM template starter kit files to the repository
- Now you should have "clean" working state
- Start loop
- Add/Modify deployment script or ARM template
- Execute deploy.ps1
- Validate the change
- Commit you change
Of course when you are ready you should share you work using pull request & code reviews and all the other ALM practices your team has in-place.
Hopefully this enables you to start building awesome apps faster 
.