Bicep is a Domain Specific Lanuage (DSL) for deploying Azure resources declaratively. It aims to drastically simplify the authoring experience with a cleaner syntax and support for modularity and code re-use. Bicep is a transparent abstraction over ARM and ARM templates, so all of your knowledge of how resources are declared in a template will carry over to Bicep. All resource types, apiVersions, and properties that are valid in an ARM template are equally valid in Bicep.

Bicep compiles down to standard ARM Template JSON files, which means the ARM JSON is effectively being treated as an Intermediate Language (IL).

1. Build the best possible language for describing, validating, and deploying infrastructure to Azure.
2. The language should provide a 'transparent abstraction' for the underlying platform. There must be no "onboarding step" to enable it to a new resource type and/or apiVersion in Bicep.
3. Code should be easy to understand at a glance and straightforward to learn, regardless of your experience with other programming languages.
4. Users should be given a lot of freedom to modularize and reuse their code. Reusing code should not require any 'copy/paste'.
5. Tooling should provide a high level of resource discoverability and validation, and should be developed alongside the compiler rather than added at the end.
6. Users should have a high level of confidence that their code is 'valid' before deploying.

1. Build a general purpose language to meet any need. This will not replace general purpose languages and you may still need to do pre or post bicep tasks in a script or high-level programming language.
2. Provide a first-class provider model for non-Azure related tasks. While we will likely introduce an extensibility model at some point, any extension points are intended to be focused on Azure infra or application deployment related tasks.

First, author your Bicep code using the Bicep language service as part of the Bicep VS Code extension, then compile that code into an ARM template using the Bicep CLI:

bicep build ./main.bicep

You should see the compiled template main.json get created in the same directory as main.bicep. Now that you have the ARM Template, you can use all existing ARM Template tooling such as what-if, the ARM Tools Extension, and the deployment CLI commands.

You can now deploy this template via any method you would like such as:

az deployment group create -f ./main.json -g my-rg

• Much simpler syntax when compared to equivalent JSON
  • No special [...] expressions syntax required
    • Directly call parameters or variables in expressions without a function (no more need for parameters('myParam'))
  • No quotes on property names (e.g. "location")
  • Simple string interpolation: '${namePrefix}-vm' instead of concat(parameters('namePrefix'), '-vm')
  • Simpler resource declaration using positional properties to avoid typing common property names like type and apiVersion explicitly.
  • Direct property access of a resource (e.g. aks.properties.fqdn instead of reference(parameters('aksName')).properties.fqdn)
• Better copy/paste experience via flexible declaration of types. Different types (e.g. variables, resources, outputs) can be declared anywhere.
  • Previously all parameters had to be declared together in one "parameters": {} object, variables had to be declared together in one "variables": {} object, etc.

The best way to get started is with the bicep tutorial, which walks you through setting up the bicep tooling, the basic structure of bicep files, and converting an ARM template into the equivalent bicep file.

Alternatively, you can try the Bicep Playground.

• No support for the copy or condition property [#185, #186]
• No explicit support for deployments across scopes (though this can be hacked together by using the Microsoft.Resources/deployments resource and using the templateLink or template property to insert the full ARM template) [#187]
  • Bicep assumes you are deploying to a resource group, though the generated template can be deployed to any scope
• Single line object and arrays (e.g. ['a', 'b', 'c']) are not yet supported
• You still need to deploy the compiled template yourself, though we plan to build native support for bicep into the powershell Az deployment cmdlets and az cli deployment commands

• Complete language spec

Because we are now treating the ARM Template as an IL, we expect and encourage other implementations of IL (ARM Template) generation. We'll keep a running list of good alternatives that may fit your use case better than bicep.

• Farmer - Generate ARM Templates using an F# DSL

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