Infrastructure as Code with Azure Bicep

The ultimate guide to becoming proficient in Azure Bicep while having a better development experience and making your Infrastructure as Code seamless and error free

Key Features

• Learn Azure Bicep from an official Microsoft trainer
• Master the authoring experience to make your Infrastructure as Code journey seamless
• Go beyond writing good templates with the help of advanced tips and tricks

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Get started with Azure Bicep and install the necessary tools
• Understand the details of how to define resources with Bicep
• Use modules to create templates for different teams in your company
• Optimize templates using expressions, conditions, and loops
• Make customizable templates using parameters, variables, and functions
• Deploy templates locally or from Azure DevOps or GitHub
• Stay on top of your IaC with best practices and industry standards

Who this book is for

This book is for cloud engineers, developers, and DevOps engineers who are responsible for writing templates to deploy resources in Microsoft Azure and contributing to CI/CD pipelines. Professionals who want to get started with DevOps and Infrastructure as Code when it comes to working with Microsoft Azure will also benefit from reading this book. Readers are expected to have a basic understanding of CI/CD concepts, must have worked with ARM templates to deploy resources to Azure, and must have used or be familiar with Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions for their CI/CD pipelines.

Table of Contents

1. An Introduction to Azure Bicep
2. Installing Azure Bicep
3. Authoring Experience
4. Compiling and Decompiling Bicep Files
5. Defining Resources
6. Using Parameters, Variables, and Template Functions
7. Understanding Expressions, Symbolic Names, Conditions and Loops
8. Defining Modules and Utilizing Outputs
9. Deploying a Local Template
10. Deploying Bicep Using Azure DevOps
11. Deploying Bicep Templates Using GitHub Actions
12. Exploring Best Practices for Future Maintenance

Yaser Adel Mehraban is a self-taught and motivated software engineer and solution architect who lives in the most livable city in the world, Melbourne, Australia. He is currently working as an Azure technical trainer for Microsoft. Some might know him as the almond croissant addict cleverly disguised as a successful web developer. He has over a decade of experience working in a variety of different teams and has helped them adapt DevOps and IaC to be able to increase team productivity when it comes to cloud resource deployment. Furthermore, he has a true passion for sharing knowledge, which has motivated him to give many international conference talks, write hundreds of technical blog posts, and publish courses on platforms such as Pluralsight. When he is not working, he mostly spends his time with his family or on his woodworking projects, which vary depending on how much space is left in the house.