What is Bicep?

  • 2 minutes

Azure Bicep is the next revision of ARM templates designed to solve some of the issues developers were facing when deploying their resources to Azure. It's an open-source tool and a domain-specific language (DSL) that provides a means to declaratively define infrastructure, describing the topology of cloud resources such as VMs, web apps, and networking interfaces. Bicep encourages code reuse and modularity in designing infrastructure as code files.

Benefits of Bicep

Simpler syntax

The new syntax allows you to write less code compared to ARM templates. Bicep is more straightforward and concise, making it easier to read and maintain.

Automatic dependency management

Bicep automatically manages the dependency between resources. You don't need to explicitly define dependencies—Bicep infers them from resource references.

Bicep CLI

Azure Bicep comes with its command line interface (Bicep CLI), which can be used independently or with Azure CLI. Bicep CLI allows you to transpile the Bicep files into ARM templates and deploy them. It can also be used to convert an existing ARM template to Bicep.

Note

When converting ARM templates to Bicep, there might be issues since some features may not be fully supported.

Visual Studio Code integration

There's excellent integration with Visual Studio Code that creates an enhanced authoring experience. Azure Bicep supports types that are used to validate templates at development time rather than runtime. The extension also supports linting, which can be used to unify the development experience between team members or across different teams.

Key features of the VS Code extension:

  • IntelliSense: Auto-completion for resource types and properties.
  • Validation: Real-time syntax and type validation.
  • Snippets: Pre-built templates for common resources.
  • Visualization: Graphical representation of resource dependencies.

For more information about Azure Bicep, see Bicep language for deploying Azure resources.

Next steps

In the next unit, you'll learn various ways to install Bicep and set up your development environment.