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

Parameters

If you want to leverage the power of infrastructure as code, which is reusability, you need to be able to pass parameters to customize the resources for different environments. The first thing Azure Resource Manager does before deployment is to have a look at the templates and resolve their values. Then, within the template, it looks for each usage of the parameter and replaces that with the actual value, then starts the deployment.

Setting a type for each parameter is mandatory and you can define them in multiple ways.

Minimalistic definition

The least you must declare for your parameters is a name and a type:

param isProd bool
param storageName string

The name of the parameter cannot be the same as any other name in the same template, such as a variable, resource, function, or other parameters.

Setting default values

At times, you might like to add a default value in case the user did not pass any value to your deployment. This can also mean the parameter...