What Is The [ARM] Sandbox?

To understand what the sandbox is, a little background about me will be helpful… I’ve been working with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates since inception. I started by working on the authoring tools in Visual Studio Pro/Ent which has the Azure Resource Group project type, and then later the extension for VS Code. Not long after that I joined the Azure Resource Manager platform team where I’ve been since. In addition to the tooling and platform work, I curate the templates for the Azure QuickStarts repo and I used to help onboard and certify templates that are published in the Azure Marketplace – now we have a team of folks for the Marketplace.

Over the past few years I have spent a lot of time with other people working on their templates – activities ranging from debugging, to “how to”, to helping develop sustainable automated solutions that scale, all using ARM templates. Most of what I know I didn’t know until someone asked me and we tried to figure it out. So it’s not just me but the Azure community we can thank for this…

So what is the sanbox? It is literally:

~/source/repos/sandbox

It’s the folder on my hard drive where I started dumping all these templates and samples as I would try to debug something or solve a particular problem. It’s not actually a repo – it’s literally just a folder on my laptop sitting next to all of my other repos. I could publish it as a repo, but it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast with 2.6K json files leading to needles in a haystack, even I am starting to have trouble finding stuff I know is in there… Much of the content has already found it’s way here, but as I’m starting to recycle more and more I wanted to find a better way to share the love rather than just responding one DM at a time…

So I have a list of topics but no real plan for the sequence, so if you have something you’d like to see – let me know and I’ll try to pop it to the top of the stack.