Introduction to Bicep:

Azure Bicep is a Domain Specific language(DSL) which offers a declarative way of authoring Infra-as-code to provision Azure resources. Bicep code is a transpiler to build ARM templates as Bicep offers rich validation and intellisense to write cleaner code and to assist with inserting parameters in the modules to help developers build ARM templates quicker and easier.

Pros and Cons of using Bicep

Positive:

1. It simplifies ARM templates: Azure Bicep code is written in a simpler syntax that is easier to read and write than the JSON syntax used with ARM Templates. 
2. It’s modular: similar to Terraform or any programming language you can modularise the deployment of VMs for example. This wasn’t really possible in ARM templates. This should lead to a repository of modules being available on GitHub, similar to Terraform Registry.

Negative:

1. It’s limited to Azure. Bicep is a Domain specific language (DSL). If you’re using multi-cloud, want to use the same language across multiple providers, or there is a possibility of expansion to multi-cloud, this probably isn’t going to fly.
2. Its early days: at the time of writing it’s version 0.3 and it not widely used as yet, support for loops and conditions has only just been introduced. 

Benefits of Bicep over Terraform

Support for all resource types and API versions: Bicep immediately supports all preview and GA versions for Azure services. As soon as a resource provider introduces new resources types and API versions, you can use them in your Bicep file. You don’t have to wait for tools to be updated before using the new services.

Integration with Azure services: Bicep is integrated with Azure services such as Azure Policy, template specs, and Blueprints.

No State file: we can perform a what-if/plan operation without any state file management. We use Azure as the state.

Pre-flight validation: bicep/ARM does pre-flight validation on the entire template, so you can fail a lot faster than with other tools

Getting started

Lets jump to learn how to set up Bicep development and deployment environments.

Bicep extension for Visual Studio Code.

To create and validate Bicep file, Visual studio Code provides language support and resource autocompletion. We need following prerequisites to complete below exercise

• VS Code with Bicep Extension installed. Refer to this link for more details on the extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-azuretools.vscode-bicep
• Latest version of Azure PowerShell or Azure CLI
• Azure subscription

storageAccount.bicep:

param storageAccountName string = 'storageaccount1'

resource storageAccount 'Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts@2021-01-01' = {  name: storageAccountName  location: resourceGroup().location  sku: {    name:'Standard_RAGRS'    tier:'Standard'  }  kind:'StorageV2'
}

output storageAccountNameOut string = storageAccount.name

main.bicep:

targetScope = 'resourceGroup'

param storageAccountName string

module storageAccount './storageAccount.bicep' = {
  name: 'storageAccountDeploy'
  params:{
    storageAccountName: storageAccountName
  }
}

bicep build main.bicep

To compile multiple .bicep files into JSON ARM Template with a single command, such as:

bicep build main.bicep secondtemplate.bicep

3. Deploying Azure Bicep

The ARM Template that results from Azure Bicep compilation is deployed to Microsoft Azure just the same as any other ARM Template. This can be done using either the Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell command-line tools.

Azure PowerShell:

New-AzResourceGroupDeployment -TemplateFile main.json -ResourceGroupName rg1

Azure CLI:

az deployment group create -f main.json -g rg1

Known Limitations:

The following limits currently exist:

• Can’t set mode or batch size on copy loops.
• Can’t combine loops and conditions.
• Single-line object and arrays, like ['a', 'b', 'c'], aren’t supported.