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

Diving into resource iterations

Sometimes, you need to create multiple resources of the same type with the same template. Since templates are reusable, it is expected from them to be able to provide the ability to do so. In Azure Bicep, you can add loops to resource declarations and dynamically define how many you want to create. Let's learn how this approach can help you avoid repeating syntax within the template.

Note

Currently, Bicep loops cannot work with negative numbers or go above 800 iterations.

Apart from resource declaration, you can apply loops to modules, properties, and outputs, which you will learn more about in Chapter 8, Defining Modules and Utilizing Outputs, of this book. Let's start by looking at syntax.

Syntax

You can use an index in a range to create loops:

resource <resource-symbolic-name> '<resource-type>@<api-version>' = [for <index> in range(<start>, <stop>): {
  <resource...