AZ-900 Practice Question 38: ARM Templates IAC
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 4 · question 8 of 10
A team needs to recreate an identical development environment on demand. Resources must be built in the right dependency order, the definition must live in source control alongside the application code, and repeated runs must leave the environment in the same state. What should they use?
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Answer:
ARM templates are Azure's implementation of infrastructure as code. A template is a JSON file using declarative syntax, letting you state what you intend to deploy rather than writing the sequence of commands to create it, and it is stored and versioned in a source repository next to the application code. Two documented benefits close the question: repeatable results, templates are idempotent, so deploying the same template many times gives the same resource types in the same state, and orchestration, where Resource Manager works out the dependency order itself and deploys in parallel where it can, from a single command.
Option A is the imperative alternative the documentation contrasts templates with: the script author has to encode the ordering by hand, and it is not idempotent unless every check is written manually. Option B cannot be validated, versioned, or run unattended. Option D confuses data with infrastructure; disk snapshots restore the contents of a disk, not the virtual networks, identity configuration, or app services around it.
Reference: ARM templates overview