Why we ship Azure infrastructure with Bicep

Bicep is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for deploying Azure resources declaratively. It aims to drastically simplify the authoring experience with a cleaner syntax, improved type safety, and better support for modularity and code re-use. Bicep is a transparent abstraction over ARM and ARM templates — anything you can do in an ARM template, you can do in Bicep.

Why Bicep over raw ARM

Raw ARM JSON is verbose, error-prone, and miserable to review. Bicep gives you:

• First-class types for resource definitions — autocomplete and validation in your editor.
• Modules that compose like functions: one module per resource group, environment, or workload.
• No JSON gymnastics for parameters, variables, or outputs.
• what-if deployments to preview every change before it lands in production.

A 600-line ARM template usually compiles down to 80–120 lines of Bicep. That’s the ratio we see across migrations.

What this means for your operations team

Bicep lowers the floor for who can confidently change cloud infrastructure. Instead of memorising the ARM resource provider schemas, your team reads code that looks like code. Code reviews are faster, drift detection is cheaper, and onboarding new engineers stops being a six-week ARM crash course.

How we work

For every PaaS engagement we deliver:

1. A modular Bicep layout — environments, networking, identity, and workload modules kept separate.
2. CI pipelines that run bicep build, what-if, and Azure Policy compliance checks on every PR.
3. A deployment story that promotes the same artefact from dev to prod, with environment-specific parameter files.

That’s how you get repeatable, reviewable, low-risk Azure infrastructure — and an operations team that owns it.