Deprecating the Microsoft Azure (legacy ASM) Terraform Provider

We're announcing the immediate deprecation of the Terraform provider for Azure ASM (Azure Service Management) in favor of the newer Azure Resource Manager (ARM) provider. The Azure ARM provider will be renamed to "Azure".

In 2015 Microsoft released a major change to Azure by introducing Azure Resource Manager (ARM), including a new portal and the associated APIs. Over time the ARM portal and respective APIs have replaced the Azure Service Management (ASM) portal and APIs. HashiCorp Terraform has supported both these portals and APIs with two separate providers, the Microsoft Azure (Legacy ASM) for ASM, and Microsoft Azure for ARM. Over the past two years, support for both the APIs was necessary until all the Azure services and functionality became available in ARM.

Microsoft has completed building out the capabilities of the ARM API and now supports almost all the services that are supported by ASM. We've also partnered with Microsoft to build out first-class support for Azure via the ARM provider, and recently offered support for all the core Azure services as detailed in the [terraform.io docs] (https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/azurerm/index.html). We expect to continue this partnership and plan to offer support for additional Azure resources over the next several quarters.

We have supported both Azure APIs (ASM and ARM) during the transition phase. [Microsoft plans to end-of-life the ASM portal] (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-portal-updates-for-classic-portal-users/) on January 8, 2018.Therefore we have decided to deprecate the Microsoft Azure (Legacy ASM) Terraform provider. We encourage any users to migrate to the ARM provider as soon as possible. The Microsoft Azure (Legacy ASM) provider will no longer receive bug fixes or new features unless they directly relate to being able to migrate to ARM. The existing releases will remain available and the GitHub repository will remain open source but will not allow further issues or PRs.

To ensure consistency with Microsoft, the “Microsoft AzureRM” provider will now be referred to as the “Azure” provider, however it’ll continue to be accessible as “azurerm” in the Provider block, as shown in the example below:

provider “azurerm” {
version = “1.0.0"
}

The new provider versions will be made available in the coming months.

We have been monitoring the download counts for the Microsoft Azure (Legacy ASM) provider and expect this to have very minimal impact, however if you are an active user of the provider and have any concerns or feedback please send us an email at: partners@hashicorp.com.