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ARM Templates / IaC with Azure Bicep

 By Morgan Lucas

 By Morgan Lucas

This is a post intended for this site, as a way to get a feel of using it consistently. Older posts are here. 

So Bicep is like Terraform but a different language that's native to Azure! That's fun. Here's a video about it (I love how enthusiastic the person is) 

My Attempt

First we have our resource group; This is where things like virtual machines (virtual computers), storage account, and some configurations are stored for organizational ease. 

az group create --name runtcp  -l eastus

Don't forget to check the naming contention of the regions you put resources in. I kept putting in us-east ala AWS.

Then I make the storage account to go in! this can store resources that can be open to the greater internet for people to download - Or it can have the proper security measures in place for certain people to have access to. 

az group deployment create --resource-group runtcp  --template-file main.bicep --mode Complete

A very cool thing the video Azure Bicep Crash Course, by Meet Kamal Today does is use an array to push the same resource in multiple regions (3:30) 


'This Declaration is Not Recognized'

I use the VS code extension for bicep, where you can start typing (usually `res`) and it gives suggestions on what you might want.

res-resource storageaccount 'Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts@2021-02-01' = {

name: storageName

location: 'eastus'

kind: 'StorageV2'

sku: {

name: 'Premium_LRS'

}

}

That says 'Let's make a storage account and name it storageName, in the East US, as a V2'

Sometimes the res- gets stuck at the beginning and the entire thing is marked as a non declared ... declaration.

'Inner Errors'

- "PreFlightValidationCheckFailed" and "AccountNameInvalid" basically boiled down to 'You don't put capital letters in your storage account name. 

resource storageaccount 'Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts@2021-02-01' = {

name: 'Starro' # ⬅ Wrong

location: 'eastus'

kind: 'StorageV2'

sku: {

name: 'Premium_LRS'

}

}

Bicep has both parameters [(param)s] and variables, which was helpfully pointed out by The Lazy Administrator; It doesn't seem as if there's much difference between the two.

param = storageAccountName string = 'starro' 

var location = 'eastus'

resource storageaccount 'Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts@2021-02-01' = {

name:  storageAccountName

location: location

kind: 'StorageV2'

sku: {

name: 'Premium_LRS'

}

}

 At this point, the machine I was using to work on this, the monitor and logic board broke. But I got this far, fixed my own errors, so here's a proof of knowledge post.