Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the infrastructure management service provided by Microsoft Azure. It enables you to provision, manage, and organize resources in Azure through a declarative model. ARM allows you to define and manage your entire infrastructure as code, providing a consistent and reproducible approach to managing Azure resources.

Key features and components of Azure Resource Manager include:

1. Resource Groups: ARM classifies resources into logical groups that serve as storage units for them. Resource groups make it easier to organize and manage resources based on projects, environments, or applications by letting you manage similar resources as a single entity.
2. Resource Providers: ARM offers resource providers for various resource types or Azure services. For the purpose of provisioning and maintaining particular Azure services, each resource provider provides a collection of resources and the appropriate APIs. Azure Compute, Azure Storage, Azure Networking, among a host of others, are just a few examples of resource providers.
3. Azure Resource Manager templates are JSON-formatted templates that ARM utilizes to specify the ideal state of your infrastructure. The resources that need to be supplied, together with any dependencies or links between them, are defined by templates. The Azure Portal, the Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell are all tools that can be used to create templates.
4. Declarative deployment is the deployment model used by ARM. You define the intended state itself rather than describing how to get there. The creation, updating, and deletion of resources are all handled by ARM in order to get the infrastructure to the required condition.
5. Updates and Deployment: ARM enables you to manage and deploy resources using templates. Through the Azure Portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, or programmatically using Azure SDKs and REST APIs, you can deploy templates directly. Because ARM allows incremental upgrades, you can change the infrastructure without affecting the resources already in use.
6. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Role-based access control is made possible by ARM’s integration with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). RBAC enables you to provide people, groups, or apps the proper ability to manage resources inside a subscription or resource group by assigning them with particular rights.
7. Resource organization and categorization via tags is made possible by ARM. Key-value pairs called tags can be used to categorize and track resources according to a variety of criteria, including ownership, cost allocation, and environmental factors.
8. Azure Policy: To impose compliance, governance, and best practices within your Azure environment, ARM interfaces with Azure Policy. Azure Policy enables you to specify limitations and guidelines for resource deployments, ensuring that resources follow established organizational standards and regulations.

Conclusion:

By offering a uniform and unified approach to infrastructure provisioning and management, ARM makes managing Azure resources easier. Azure resource deployment, management, and governance are simplified by ARM’s resource grouping, declarative model, templates, RBAC, and policy enforcement capabilities.