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Specification Glossary

Qiaoqiao Zhang edited this page Nov 6, 2025 · 1 revision

Glossary

This article defines some of the terms used in the articles under documentation directory.

Resource type

In case of ARM, a service is a collection of resource types or resource type groups that version uniformly in perpetuity.

Organization

A organization is a set of services that group together, those services normally share a common ARM Resource Provider (RP) namespace, RPNS.

Each service in given organization must version uniformly but each service within a organization can have their own version lifecycle.

A organization has a path of form:

specification/<organization>

Resource Provider Namespace (RPNS)

The resource provider namespace is the service ARM API resource provider namespace. In the folder structure guideline, A RPNS has a path form of

specification/<organization>/resource-manager/<RPNS>

Service

An Azure service is a set of operations that version uniformly (in perpetuity). See Azure Service Versioning Guide for more details.

In specs repository, an ARM service has a path of form:

specification/<organization>/resource-manager/<RPNS>/<service>

A data-plane service has a path of form:

specification/<organization>/data-plane/<service>

Note

Some existing services follow different directory structure layouts. All such layouts are legacy, deprecated, and strongly discouraged going forward.

For example, specification/containerservice/resource-manager/Microsoft.ContainerService/aks is a folder for the aks service within the Microsoft.ContainerService ARM Resource Provider namespace.

You can learn more about how a service maps to its directory in the directory structure article.

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