Azure Automation: Use a nested ARM template as an user defined function to bypass the start time issue of schedules
Lately I am busy with Azure Automation . In terms of ARM templates I run into a number of issues with this product. See also my previous blog postings about this. This time too I had to look for another workaround. In this case it concerns the start time of a schedule . This must be at least 5 minutes in the future for the product group each time you do an ARM deployment for the schedule object. This resource is also not complying to the idempotency rules of ARM template. My workaround is to mark the date part of the startTime (for daily, weekly, montly recurring schedules) in my parameter file with ' GEN-DATE ' placeholder and my ARM template will generate each time the correct date if I do the deploy. To replace the placeholder with the correct value I first thought to use an user defined function for this purpose. After reading the documentation, I could conclude that this functionality did not match what I needed. An user defined function consist of input parameters and