5 Cool Things About Azure Bicep Templates

Azure Bicep is a language you can use to deploy your Azure resources in an automated fashion.  In this post I want to give 5 reasons why you should be learning and using Azure Bicep!

1: Supports new Azure features immediately

Azure Bicep has been developed by the team at Microsoft. Because of this it will support all preview and generally available (GA) Azure products or features immediately.  

Third-party infrastructure as code (IaC) tools have suffered at the hands of this for sometime now.  As they have to wait to hear about these new products and features being released.

2: Simple

For a long time the way to automate deployment of Azure resources using a first party tool or language has been using ARM Templates.  But if you've ever seen or used an ARM Template you'll know they are complex and long.

Azure Bicep isn't like that, the team have worked hard to deliver a simpler syntax. 50 lines of ARM Template code can now be done in 15 lines of Bicep code.

3: Open Source

Azure Bicep is a project developed by Microsoft, but it is one of their open source projects.  This means that you can head over to https://github.com/Azure/bicep/, raise a question or issues with Bicep and the team will help you out and so will the community.  But also if you want to you can contribute to the project and help improve it for yourself and others!

4:  It's supported by Microsoft support

Bicep isn't a paid product, you can use it for free.  Which might lead you to think that you won't get any support from Microsoft if you run into an issue, wrong!  This is fully supported by Microsoft so you can can log a support ticket and hopefully get assistance with your problem. 👍🏻

5: Modularity

With Bicep you can break up parts of your code into modules.  So you could have a Bicep module for deploy an Azure Web App and then a module that deploys a SQL database.

You can reuse these modules.  Pulling them into deployments as and when you need them.

If you haven't already tried your hand at using Azure Bicep templates to deploy your resources then go and give it a try today.  You won't be disappointed!

Illustrations by Aleksandr Smetanov & Icons 8 from Ouch!