Azure Deployment Environments (ADE) continues to innovate by providing a more seamless experience for customers by enabling rapid and efficient use of popular Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) frameworks through the extensibility model. This model offers development teams the ability to customize environment templates to meet their specific needs, while platform engineers can create templates using their preferred IaC formats. The latest updates to ADE bring significant new capabilities:
Pulumi Integration: Expanding IaC Options
One of the notable features in the latest update to ADE is support for Pulumi, in addition to Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Bicep, and Terraform. Pulumi is a popular IaC framework that allows developers to write infrastructure code in a variety of programming languages, including TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, or C#. This flexibility makes it easier for teams to adopt and integrate existing workflows with ADE.
Customers can use the standard Pulumi container image or create their own by following the published guide. This feature is currently in preview and is intended to simplify the deployment process and improve the user experience. For more information on getting started with Pulumi in ADE, customers can visit Pulumi’s blog and register for an upcoming webinar.
Project-Based Catalogs: Tailoring Infrastructure to Projects
ADE now supports project-based catalogs, allowing platform engineers to provide project-specific templates. This feature, currently in preview, allows development teams to directly customize templates for their application infrastructure needs. By adding repositories to projects as catalogs, teams gain access to infrastructure tailored to their unique needs, increasing agility and autonomy while maintaining control and oversight.
Quick Start Template: Simplified Setup
The implementation of the Quick Start Template, now generally available, significantly simplifies the process of deploying and configuring ADE. With one-click deployment, platform engineers can quickly deploy ADE, giving development teams rapid access to the infrastructure they need within their enterprise firewalls for security, compliance, and cost management.
Enhanced Catalog Management: Improving Collaboration and Efficiency
Several enhancements to catalog management are designed to improve collaboration between platform engineers and development teams:
Catalog Attachment via GitHub Apps: This feature provides a secure and robust mechanism for adding GitHub repositories as catalogs, facilitating better collaboration.
Automatic Sync Functionality: Configuring catalogs to automatically sync every 30 minutes ensures that development teams have the latest versions of each template and reduces the risk of outdated configurations.
Improved Visibility: A centralized view of successfully synced catalog items helps you track and manage catalog items more effectively.
Trusted Service Support for PAT: Customers who use personal access tokens (PAT) to add their repositories as catalogs can now keep their Key Vaults private from the internet while allowing trusted Microsoft services to bypass firewall rules.
Private Registry Support: Controlled Access
ADE’s extensibility model now includes support for private registries, which allow customers to bring container images into Deployment Environments through a private registry for more controlled access. This feature is available in private preview, offering additional security and management options for organizations.
Conclusion
Azure Deployment Environments continues to evolve, offering powerful new capabilities that enhance customization, simplify deployments, and improve collaboration between the platform and development teams. With support for pooling, project-based catalogs, advanced catalog management, and simplified setup through a quickstart template, ADE will enable organizations to achieve more with their infrastructure deployments.
To learn more about these new capabilities and get started with Azure Deployment Environments, visit the Azure Deployment Environments Build blog and watch the ADE session at Build 2024. Get started today and discover the enhanced flexibility and control that ADE brings to your development projects.