Summary
In this chapter, we had a lot to discuss, a few concepts to agree on, and a few comparisons to make. You learned what IaC is very briefly, and then I made sure you knew about ARM templates, since that is the whole reason Bicep was created.
That was then followed by what Azure Bicep is, and you learned that it is not a new programming language and is a revision of ARM templates, with its own syntax. You saw why there was a need for creating yet another solution to implement IaC, even though there are plenty of tools, such as Pulumi and Terraform, out there. We talked about the cloud enablers not knowing any programming languages and the learning curve that would be in place if they had to learn a high-level language to do their day-to-day jobs.
Once that was settled, you learned how Bicep works and got to know the tools that can be used to create, compile, and deploy your resources using Bicep. We saw the built-in integration with the Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell, and how Bicep has its own CLI, which makes it easy for you to even decompile an ARM template into a Bicep file.
In the next chapter, we will get started with Bicep by going through how to install it on multiple different platforms.
