ADF: Keep linked service names the same across environments for Azure Data Factory

I recently recorded a podcast with Kamil Nowinsky. Kamil is well-known for creating some tools that make it easy to publish individual Azure Data Factory pipelines. It’s a far better method that the standard ARM (Azure Resource Manager) template deployment that’s provided by Microsoft.

However, if you use this method (and I recommend you do), you’ll be publishing pipelines separate to the linked services that your datasets connect to.

One mistake I’ve seen a few clients making lately, is that when they created the linked services in different environments, they did so with slightly different names. Because of that, they needed to modify the deployed objects after deployment. You don’t want to be doing that.

Data Factory datasets use the name of the linked service to identify it, so it’s really important that when you’re creating the linked services that you keep the name of the linked services consistent across the different environments where you’ll be deploying pipelines and datasets.

Even though the linked services will be pointing to different servers, etc. in different environments, keeping the names of the linked services consistent will make your life much easier.

2021-01-27