Azure Infrastructure as Code

6 Simplifying ARM templates using the Bicep DSL

This chapter covers

• Bicep, a simpler DSL for writing ARM templates
• Transpiling Bicep files into ARM templates
• Bicep notation for resources, parameters, variables, and outputs
• Modules, an easy way to split larger templates into readable pieces

By now you are familiar with ARM templates and the process of writing and deploying them. And hopefully you are impressed with the opportunities that IaC and ARM templates, in particular, give you.

Still, you may have noticed that describing more extensive infrastructure this way is not perfect. It is generally accepted that ARM templates have several drawbacks, mainly because they are written in JSON. These are some examples:

• The JSON notation forces you ...