Book Image

Infrastructure as Code with Azure Bicep

By : Yaser Adel Mehraban
1 (1)
Book Image

Infrastructure as Code with Azure Bicep

1 (1)
By: Yaser Adel Mehraban

Overview of this book

It’s no secret that developers don’t like using JSON files to declare their resources in Azure because of issues such as parameter duplication and not being able to use comments in templates. Azure Bicep helps resolve these issues, and this book will guide you, as a developer or DevOps engineer, to get the most out of the Bicep language. The book takes you on a journey from understanding Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and what their drawbacks are to how you can use Bicep to overcome them. You will get familiar with tools such as Visual Studio Code, the Bicep extension, the Azure CLI, PowerShell, Azure DevOps, and GitHub for writing reusable, maintainable templates. After that, you’ll test the templates and deploy them to an Azure environment either from your own system or via a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. The book features a detailed overview of all the Bicep features, when to use what, and how to write great templates that fit well into your existing pipelines or in a new one. The chapters progress from easy to advanced topics and every effort has been put into making them easy to follow with examples, all of which are accessible via GitHub. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed a solid understanding of Azure Bicep and will be able to create, test, and deploy your resources locally or in your CI/CD pipelines.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Azure Bicep
6
Section 2: Azure Bicep Core Concepts
11
Section 3: Deploying Azure Bicep Templates

Bicep best practices

Like any other IaC tool, Bicep requires some discipline to make sure that if you look at your templates in a few years, when the original developers might have left the team, the new members can still read and modify them without any issues.

Parameters

Starting with parameters, the very first recommendation is to choose a good naming convention, document it, and stick to it. Make sure your resource names are clear, it's easy to pinpoint their role, and they are easy to find. Keep all the parameter definitions at the top of the template to make it easier to review, add, or remove them in the future. You can also refer to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/ready/azure-best-practices/resource-naming to find some of the most used conventions and best practices published by Microsoft.

Limit the values for your parameters using the @allowed decorator to reduce the risk of a user passing an invalid or impractical value to your...