Deployment Stacks: Getting Started

If your Azure deployments still feel like fragile history logs duct-taped together with prayer, this session is your wake-up call. Sydney from the Azure Deployments team walks you through Deployment Stacks - the native Azure resource that finally treats your Bicep templates like a lifecycle-aware, RBAC-governed, drift-resistant source of truth. You will learn the what and why of stacks, how `action-on-unmanage` and `deny-settings-mode` lock down accidental deletes, how the new Stacks What-If slashes noise by triangulating snapshot, live, and desired state, and how to bake all of it into GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps pipelines with the `bicep-deploy` task. Whether you are sick of orphaned resources, terrified of on-call deletes, or just want your ARM IaC story to actually scale, this is the modern deployments playbook for Azure infrastructure engineers. 📢 Speakers Sydney Smith — Program Manager, Azure Deployments team, Microsoft 💡 Key Takeaways Deployment Stacks are a native Azure resource that manages a collection of resources as a single lifecycle-aware unit, replacing fragile classic deployment history. `action-on-unmanage` controls what happens to resources removed from your template - detach (leave them), delete, or delete-all - eliminating orphaned resources. `deny-settings-mode` applies RBAC-based protection (deny-delete or deny-write) to managed resources, preventing accidental portal or CLI deletes outside the stack. The new Stacks What-If triangulates snapshot, live, and desired state to produce dramatically less noisy change predictions than classic What-If. Stacks ship first-class tooling across Azure CLI, PowerShell, and the portal, with full visibility into managed resources and their state. The `bicep-deploy` task brings stacks natively into GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps pipelines for production-grade IaC workflows. Join the monthly Bicep/ARM community call via aka.ms/arm-news to follow roadmap and influence the product. 📖 Resource Deployment Stacks documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/azu... — Official Microsoft Learn reference for stacks concepts, parameters, and CLI/PowerShell usage. Bicep documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/azu... — Core Bicep language and tooling docs on Microsoft Learn. What-If for ARM/Bicep deployments https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/azu... — How change prediction works for Azure deployments, including Stacks What-If. Azure Bicep GitHub repo https://github.com/Azure/bicep — Source, issues, and roadmap for Bicep and Deployment Stacks. Bicep Deploy GitHub Action and ADO task https://github.com/Azure/bicep-deploy — Pipeline integration for deploying stacks in GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps.