Infrastructure As Code

JacksWastedLife In my view, automated deployment on Azure and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) are two different things. You can automate all your deployments without achieving IaC. However, by creating IaC you will achieve both. In case of automated deployment you are just provisioning the resources but IaC is actually a replica of your infrastructure meaning if your infrastructure is broken you can just run the code to rebuild it including all the configurations and applications installed within you VMs.

Personally I find ARM templates are very useful and easy for programmatic or automated provisioning of Azure resources. I do not think you can achieve IaC by only using ARM templates. However, you can use PowerShell DSC with ARM templates to achieve IaC. 

On the other hand, Terrafom or Ansible are also good choice if you want to achieve IaC. They have various modules that you can use to automate pretty much everything starting from Azure resource deployment to installing and configuring your application within a VM. Still sometimes you may need to use PowerShell/Shell commands to achieve some automation for which modules are not yet available.

Please keep in mind when you are targeting IaC, your objective should be automate as much as possible. So, it really depends on you or your organisation want to achieve. Do not proceed with anything without a proper road-map and architecture. Please let me know if you have any further query.

Thanks,

Rohan Islam | Azure Architect