What is new in Azure Bicep v0.4?

Hello Cloud Marathoners,

I hope everyone getting a chance to enjoy the summer and spend some time with loved once.

That said – Azure Bicep team does not seem slowing down, and I love it!
New features and capabilities have been added to Azure Bicep product v0.4 version, and we will review those innovations on this post.

What is Azure Bicep?

Azure Bicep is a domain-specific language (DSL) that significantly simplifies the Azure resource authoring. It makes representation of your Azure digital estate concise with clean syntax by adding reliable type safety and code-reuse.

A typical Azure Bicep language code for an Azure storage account declaration will look as simple as the following code below – which basically explains why Bicep is called a DSL.

Why would you need it?

There are number of benefits in using Infrastructure-as-Code approach. Azure Bicep might be the right tool for you to use for Azure deployments, especially if you are trying to modernize and simplify the Azure deployment process.

Let’s look into scenarious where Bicep is the right tool to use:

โœ”๏ธ Want to use language native to Azure?
โœ”๏ธ Looking for fully integrated templates withing Azure platform?
โœ”๏ธ Looking for fully supported product with Microsoft?
โœ”๏ธ Don’t want to keep or worry about your resource state information
โœ”๏ธ Looking to modernize and easy transition from JSON

Well, if your response is YES for above statements/questions then Bicep will be right tool for your solution.

New additions to Azure Bicep in version 0.4

There are numbers of enhancement and features has been added from this release. Let’s look at main Highlights of these features below:

โœ… Linter MVP – The Bicep linter will inspect your code and catch a customizable set of authoring best practices.ย 
โœ… Deprecated parameter modifiers removed – Strip out deprecated parameter modifier syntax
โœ… New code snippets – Suggestion with new code snippets added
โœ… Bug fixes – Number of bug fixes added, thanks to community support
โœ… Bicep Playground fixes – Playground doesn’t load after breaking change.
โœ… Documentation and examples update
โœ… Support for List method call on Azure resource references
โœ… Support for JSON literal string conversion
โœ… Support for using local json templates as modules
โœ… Support for object body completion snippets

What is next?

There are still number of milestones in-front of Bicep team, as the versioning # of Bicep project indicates. That said, starting from Bicep version 0.3 you can get an official Microsoft support.

Below is the sneak-pick preview on what is cooking for v0.5 – which is expected to be out sometimes around August month this year.

Here is an official reference to next milestone on Azure Bicep v0.5.

Thank you for reading till this point. Stay tuned for more Azure Cloud automation and Bicep related posts.

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