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

Template functions

There are many functions that you can leverage to enhance your template. These functions give you the ability to create complex expressions or dynamic values to be used later in the template. Many of these functions work with specific data types that we have seen before, such as arrays, strings, objects, and integers. However, there are also functions that are designed to help you create logical flows or get a scope to apply your template to. Let's start with generic functions first.

The any function

The any function allows you to resolve issues around data types when you are not sure of a property's type. This could be in a case when the property expects you to pass an integer, but you need to pass it as a string, that is, ('0.5'). Here is an example of the any function in practice:

publicIPAddress: any((pipId == '') ? null : {
  id: pipId
})

This function can be assigned to any value in Bicep. Date functions are...