Once an ARM template and its accompanying parameter files are written, they can be applied to an Azure environment. There are PowerShell Cmdlet and Azure CLI commands available for applying an ARM template from a scripting environment. When ARM templates are used for the infrastructure of an application, Azure Pipelines can be used for deploying not only code but also ARM templates.

No matter which approach is used for deployment, all of them will have a deployment mode. This can be either incremental or complete. In incremental mode, all resources specified in the template will be created in Azure or their properties will be updated if the resource already exists. In complete mode, all resources that are not specified in the template and already exist in Azure will also be removed. The default deployment mode is incremental.

In the next sections, several tools for executing deployments are discussed, starting with PowerShell.