Provision state

The Azure Developer CLI introduced the provision state on version 1.4.0. Provision state is specific for provisioning providers which use ARM templates for deploying resources, like the bicep provider.

Specification

Provision state is enabled by default (You don't need to opt-in). azd creates a hash from the ARM template (template and input parameters), which is persisted on Azure as part of the deployment and it is used to find out if the template changes. When running azd provision, azd creates the hash for the current template and checks if there is a previous deployment on Azure with provision state. azd will only submit the deployment if the current hash is different than what is previously stored in the provision state, or if there is no provision state.

You can use the flag --no-state, when running azd provision, to provision your infrastructure regardless of any provision-state.

Provision state is not aware of changes made to your infrastructure outside of azd. For example, updates made using the Azure portal or the Azure CLI (az). When such external updates happen, azd will skip provisioning since the hash stored in provision state is unchanged and matches the current template's hash.

Scenarios

The next table describes some common cases where provision state is either used or ignored.

Scenario	Result	Notes
Run provision twice	Second run is skipped
Run provision, then change IaC, then provision again	no-skip	No external changes to IaC
Run provision, then update infrastructure externally, then provision again	Second run is skipped	azd will not detect external changes
Run provision with flag: azd provision --no-state	no-skip	Not skipped regardless of any previous provision

Running on CI/CD

You can take advantage of provision state for any continuous integration pipeline like GitHub or Azure DevOps. azd will automatically skip provisioning when no changes are detected which helps speed up CI/CD deployments.

Alternatively, if you'd like to ensure that no infrastructure drift ever occurs due to updates outside of azd, run with azd provision --no-state.