bicep VS arm-ttk

Bicep has limitations which makes it non-declarative even though it is marketed as declarative: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manag...

MSFT is trying to add features to make this better, but it is not in production yet: https://github.com/Azure/bicep/issues/10460

Additionally, Bicep does not support interacting with Azure Active Directory: https://github.com/Azure/bicep/issues/7724

So it really is not very useful. Terraform is better in almost every single conceivable way.

Since its launch Bicep has become popular within the IT community. You can find blog posts, tweets, conference sessions, and plenty of interaction on the official Bicep GitHub space. Bicep became production ready at v0.3. It is supported by Microsoft Support Plans.

In addition, check the similar issue on GitHub.

There is an ongoing thread here https://github.com/Azure/bicep/issues/1853

Let's assume I already have an APIM bicep template that provisions API Management Instance.

I just created my first Emacs package, a major mode for the Bicep Language. I have to say it was quite easy to get to this. The Emacs docs are great and using LSP made it easy to add completion.

Bicep unfortunately chose to create a DSL instead of just exposing the dotnet API to allow IaC. Now there is a nuget package for Bicep core (https://github.com/Azure/bicep/pull/5826) you may be able to use dotnet code.

Bicep is open source with a strong community supporting it. All the binaries for the different supported operating systems can be downloaded from the official releases page of the Bicep open source project.

The backend code is C#, with CosmosDb/TableStorage for persistence. Our client tools are also mostly C#, with some TypeScript, and some Python. Our backend code is currently closed-source, but our Bicep repo gives an example of our coding style.

The Azure Resource Manager template (ARM template) test toolkit checks whether your template uses recommended practices. When your template isn't compliant with recommended practices, it returns a list of warnings with the suggested changes. By using the test toolkit, you can learn how to avoid common problems in template development.

In order to use ARM TTK, I'd recommend cloning the GitHub repository rather than downloading the artifact linked from the official document because the repository gets regularly updated in a fast pace.