12.2. Azure Policy and Blueprints
Azure Policy and Azure Blueprints are essential services provided by Microsoft Azure to enforce organizational standards and assess compliance at scale. Both services play a crucial role in managing and automating governance and compliance with internal policies and external regulations. By implementing these services, organizations can ensure their cloud environments are consistent, secure, and align with their compliance requirements.
Azure Policy is a service in Azure that enables you to create, assign, and manage policies that enforce different rules and effects over your resources. It helps ensure your resource configurations comply with corporate standards and service level agreements (SLAs). Azure Policy does this by evaluating the resources in Azure and assessing whether they comply with the policies you’ve created. It brings the ability to automate and scale compliance checks for Azure resources in a centralized manner.
Azure Policy helps in several ways:
- Policy Definition: A policy definition expresses what to evaluate and what action to take. For example, you can ensure all virtual machines in a specific subscription have a particular configuration or that only certain types of resources are allowed.
- Policy Assignment: Policy definitions are assigned to resource groups, subscriptions, or management groups. Once assigned, all resources in that scope are evaluated for compliance.
- Policy Parameters: They help to simplify your policy management by reducing the number of policy definitions you must create. You can define parameters when creating a policy and then pass values when that policy is assigned.
- Initiatives: Often, you want to enforce a collection of policy definitions for a particular scenario or compliance need. Instead of assigning each policy individually, you can organize them into an initiative (sometimes called a policy set).
- Compliance Evaluation: Azure Policy continuously evaluates the compliance status of Azure resources, providing a compliance report that can be reviewed in the Azure portal or retrieved through APIs.
- Remediation: For resources that are non-compliant, Azure Policy can perform remediation tasks by applying the required changes to bring resources into compliance.
- Exemptions: You can exempt specific resources from being evaluated by certain policies if needed. This provides flexibility in scenarios where exceptions to a given policy are warranted.
Azure Policy is an essential tool for cloud governance, ensuring that resources are compliant with corporate standards and technical constraints. It supports compliance with external regulations and can help enforce cost control by preventing unnecessary resources from being provisioned.
