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

Installation on Windows

To install the Bicep CLI on Windows, you have a few options. You can either use Windows Installer, Chocolatey, or winget or manually use PowerShell.

Installation using Windows Installer

You can download the installer from the following URL and install it: https://github.com/Azure/bicep/releases/latest/download/bicep-setup-win-x64.exe.

The following is the Azure Bicep CLI installation wizard:

Figure 2.2 – Azure Bicep CLI wizard

You do not need to have administrator rights to do so and the CLI automatically gets added to your PATH environment variable for easy access from any terminal, whether it is the Windows terminal, the PowerShell window, or a WSL terminal.

Installation using Chocolatey

Chocolatey is a fantastic package manager for Windows that allows you to install your desired software using scripts instead of Windows installers, which is ideal for automation; think NuGet but for software. If you do not have...