Creating ADX clusters with ARM templates
ARM templates are declarative JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files that we use to define our infrastructure and configuration requirements. There is a lot of debate surrounding the ease of readability of JSON and at the time of writing, Microsoft has a new tool in preview called Bicep, which is similar to Terraform's propriety HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). We are not going to compare ARM with Bicep or Terraform; each tool has a purpose and what you choose ultimately depends on your requirements.
It is not possible to cover all aspects of ARM templates in this short chapter, so we will cover the basics to get started.
ARM template structure
As shown in the following code snippet, ARM templates consist of six sections. There is a seventh section called functions, which is rarely used, and I will not cover it here. I have only used the functions section once:
{
"$schema": "https...
