Getting hands-on knowledge of Azure Bicep
Azure Bicep is the first of the two cloud-specific IaC tools we will be looking at in this chapter. For quite a while, if you wanted to use the native tool provided by Microsoft, you would need to write an ARM template.
When we discussed Microsoft Azure in Chapter 4, Deploying to Microsoft Azure, we stated that ARM is short for Azure Resource Manager – that is, the API that powers all of Azure. You will have been using ARM when using the Azure portal, command-line tools, PowerShell, or any IaC tool we have covered to launch or manage your Microsoft Azure resources.
The best way I can think to describe ARM templates is that they are the JSON payloads that are sent to the API – I won’t include an example of what an ARM template looks like as there is a lot of it, but I have included an example file called arm-template-example.json in the same folder as the Bicep file in the accompanying repository. As you can see, there...
