So first, what is Bicep? If you haven’t heard of it, I have to ask – how!? Microsoft’s new deployment language for Azure has made waves since its launch. Continuously improving and taking in a tonne of community feedback it is an interesting offering from Microsoft. To be honest, at first I wasn’t convinced by Bicep. I was slightly confused as to why it was needed. I had put in the time to understand and use ARM templates. I don’t find them super confusing, but I do understand they can be frustrating and quite complex.

That exact point is what Bicep aims to simplify. It uses declarative syntax to deploy Azure resources. This provides concise syntax, reliable type safety, and support for code reuse. Bicep is a transparent abstraction over ARM template JSON and doesn’t lose any of the JSON template capabilities. In plain English, that means that Bicep hides the complexity of ARM templates. Perhaps think of it like shorthand templates 🙂

During deployment, the Bicep CLI converts a Bicep file into ARM template JSON. This means that Bicep has full feature alignment out of the box with all resource types, API versions, and properties that are valid in an ARM template.

This simplicity, combined with a common need to create a small IaaS test area is what lead me to create this post. Below I am going to outline a version of the deployment I use to create a quick and simple test environment. All documented and deployed via Bicep.

First up, what will this environment contain? I’m including resources I find helpful with configurations I find I most commonly need. I am leaving out certain resources that are less cost effective or frequently required (DDoS Standard for example), and I will allow for a conditional deployment of some that I just don’t want to wait on every time. I am looking at you Virtual Network Gateway 🙂

• Virtual Network
  • Bastion, Gateway, Firewall, Windows, Linux – subnets
• Windows VM – Server 2019
• Ubuntu VM – 20.04-LTS
• Azure Bastion
• Azure Firewall – Standard | Premium – Conditional based on Parameter
• VNG – Conditional based on Parameter

So why does Bicep help me with the above? Genuinely I just never got time to create the same in ARM. When working on learning some Bicep I decided to use it as an opportunity to create something useful for myself.

All of the above is written in Bicep and stored in a public repo here. This includes a YAML Pipeline that can allow you test and if successful, deploy the environment to Azure using Azure DevOps. For more on that test stage, see my other post here.

You can see a high-level of the resources that can be deployed below, which I have pulled from the Visualiser function on VS Code:

Without the VNG included, you should see the entire environment built in under seven minutes.

Adding the VNG however will increase this most commonly to at least 20 minutes.

As always, if there are any questions or feedback, get in touch! Happy Bicep-ing! 💪