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

Getting nightly builds

If you would like to stay ahead of others and take advantage of new features, you can use the latest pre-release version of Bicep. Currently, the team will not publish the pre-release versions, so you need to go into their GitHub Actions run history and manually download the pre-release version you are after for the main branch.

Follow https://github.com/Azure/bicep/actions to view the latest action workflow. Once there, select the latest build that has been successful, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.4 – Bicep's GitHub Action run history

On the build page, select the artifact you would like to download and install it according to one of the approaches we have gone through based on your operating system.

Figure 2.5 – Artifact list on nightly builds

Warning

These versions might have known or unknown issues much like any other beta or pre-release version of any software, so...