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Azure muscles up

February 3, 2021.

Bicep.

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Microsoft’s Project Bicep, described as “experimental”, is a strongly typed declarative language that lets users define a set of Azure resources directly in the code, without going through Azure’s portal dashboard. Defining resources as code means that infrastructure configuration can be under version control, copied and redeployed to different regions, and automated as part of a DevOps workflow. Resources are usually defined in ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates, which are JSON files that specify the required resources and their configuration. ARM templates are effective but verbose, and authoring them is fiddly and error-prone – though there are also tools to help, such as Visual Studio Code with the ARM Tools extension. Authoring templates is set to get much easier, thanks to the Bicep language, which acts as a transpiler generating the JSON for an ARM template. There is also a decompiler, which aims to convert an existing ARM template to Bicep. The project team stated that since Bicep is an experimental language, changes made to future versions may mean that it won’t be back-compatible. Using it in a production environment is therefore a gamble. You’ll find Bicep and its documentation on this GitHub repo.

The Register, Tim Anderson, “Project Bicep: Microsoft muscles in on Terraform’s territory to manage Azure resources with code.”

2021-02-03