ARM, Bicep, knees and toes! Infrastructure as code for beginners.

ARM, Bicep, knees and toes! Infrastructure as code for beginners.

Originally from Mexico. Tech Lead at Geneca. Spend time with family, movies, videogames, soccer. @thesoccerdev drkclw samueljgomez

Agenda • Who is this talk for? • Infrastructure as Code • Azure Resource Manager • Tool overview • ARM templates • Bicep • Terraform

Who is this talk for? • People completely new to IaC. • Little experience with ARM templates. • New to Bicep. • New to Terraform.

Infrastructure as Code • Deploy infrastructure in an automated, consistent and repeatable manner.

Azure Resource Manager • API provisioning engine built into Azure.

Azure Resource Manager benefits • Manage infrastructure through templates. • Deploy resources in a consistent state. • Define dependencies between resources. • Apply tags to resources to organize them. • Apply access control.

ARM templates

ARM templates • JSON format with declarative syntax. • Defines infrastructure and configuration.

ARM Template format

ARM DEMO

https://www.rambli.com/2016/06/the-prayer-of-the-demo-gods/

Bicep

Bicep • Domain specific language that aims to drastically simplify authoring experience. • Transparent abstraction over ARM templates.

Bicep format

Bicep example

Modules • Allow you to use reference other bicep AND ARM template files. • Import modules from private or public registries.

Conditional (if) • Allow you to deploy resources only when condition is met.

Loops • Define multiple copies of: • • • • • Resources Modules Variables Properties Outputs

Loop over index

Loop over items

Loop over dictionary items

Loop over integer index and items

Loop over items with conditional

BICEP DEMO

Terraform

Terraform. • Open source IaC tool for provisioning and managing infrastructure. • HCL syntax. • Can provision resources to multiple cloud providers.

Terraform providers. • Plugins used to interact with cloud providers, SaaS providers and other APIs. • Azure • AWS • Google Cloud

Terraform syntax. • Arguments. • Blocks.

Terraform state. • Terraform stores infrastructure state in a separate file.

TERRAFORM DEMO

Which one should I use?

Terraform. • Resources not in Azure (including onprem). • Mix of cloud providers. • More accessible for developers.

Bicep. • Resources in Azure only. • Share templates via registries. • More accessible to developers.

ARM. • Resources in Azure only. • Do not want to learn new language. • Team has experience with ARM templates.

Questions?

Useful links. • https://learn.microsoft.com/enus/azure/templates/. • https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstarttemplates • https://github.com/Azure/bicep. • https://github.com/hashicorp/terraformprovider-azurerm/tree/main/examples.

@thesoccerdev drkclw samueljgomez