DevOps and Beyond

VSW10 An Infrastructure as Code Bake-off, Comparing ARM, Terraform and Bicep

11/16/2022

2:00pm - 3:15pm

Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Mike Benkovich

Developer, Business Owner, Consultant, Cloud Architect, Microsoft Azure MVP and an Online Instructor

Infrastructure as Code comes in many flavors, and the Azure Cloud's default deployment templates work with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to define and deploy infrastructure. Working with the JSON format of ARM can be challenging, but Microsoft has introduced a language processor called Bicep which generates ARM as output. At the same time there are other options, including scripting tools, Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible and others. In this session, we'll compare creating infrastructure using ARM, Terraform and Bicep, and compare pros and cons to each.

You will learn:

  • What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and why should I care?
  • How does ARM, Terraform and Bicep compare?
  • What tradeoffs do I make?