How to Capture and Use the labVmId from an ARM Template Deployment in an Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline

Azure DevOps pipelines enable seamless automation of infrastructure provisioning and application deployment processes. One common scenario is deploying a virtual machine (VM) using an ARM (Azure Resource Manager) template and capturing important output values like the VM’s resource ID, which can then be used in subsequent steps of the pipeline.

In this article, we will walk through the process of using the AzureResourceManagerTemplateDeployment@3 task in Azure DevOps YAML pipelines to deploy an Azure VM and capture its resource ID as the labVmId variable for later use in the pipeline.

Objective

The main objective is to:

1. Deploy an Azure virtual machine using an ARM template.
2. Capture the VM’s resource ID (vmId) as a pipeline variable (labVmId).
3. Use this captured variable in subsequent steps, such as deploying applications or running configurations on the VM.

Step 1: Ensure Your ARM Template Outputs the VM ID

Before we proceed with the YAML pipeline, we need to ensure that the ARM template being used is set up to output the VM’s resource ID. In ARM templates, the…