Terraform vs Bicep for Azure

This repository contains code samples for a blog post and a talk who compare Terraform and Bicep for working with Azure only. It also contains the slides of the talk (in French 🥖).
The code samples provision a static website in a storage account both using Bicep and Terraform/Tofu.

Use the code samples

The IaC files are living in the infra folder, there is a subfolder for Terraform and for Bicep.

Terraform/tofu

Make sure the following prerequisites are met:

1. You are using a Linux-based environment (everything has been written/tested using Ubuntu 22.04 with WSL)
2. You have an Azure subscription
3. Azure CLI is installed and you are authenticated against your subscription
4. OpenTofu is installed (instructions here)

If everything is ok, go to the infra/terraform folder from your terminal and run init-state/init.sh -l <AZURE-REGION> (replace <AZURE-REGION>) with the Azure region you want to use (candaeast, francecentral, etc.).
This will provision a storage account to host Tofu's state in your Azure subscription, and initialize Tofu using the newly created file config.azurerm.tfbackend for the backend configuration.

Then you can go ahead and run tofu validate, tofu plan and tofu apply (or tofu apply -auto-approve) to provision the resources.

The URL of the static website is provided as an output of the apply command (you should see it at the very end of the output).

Bicep

For Bicep you will only need an Azure subscription and Azure CLI installed and authenticated against your subscription.
Go to the infra/bicep folder from your terminal (it has been tested with zsh but should work with PowerShell too) and run the following command to provision the resources (you can replace canadaeast with the location of your choice):

az deployment sub create -n deploy-tf-vs-bicep -l canadaeast -f main.bicep -p location=canadaeast

You can also replace create with validate if you just want to validate the syntax, of what-if to preview the changes.

The URL of the static website is provided as an output of the deployment, you need to scroll up a little bit to see it, in the properties.outputs.websiteEndpoint.value properties of the JSON output.

Experiment !

Don't stop once the resources are created. Make changes to the code, mess things up from the portal, and run Bicep/Tofu again to see what happens !
There are commented lines in the code, start by uncommenting these and see how it goes.

Tearing up

Once you are done, don't forget to remove the created resources, even if they cost almost nothing:

• From the infra/terraform folder, run tofu destroy -auto-approve to destroy the resources provisioned with OpenTofu. Run also az group delete -n rg-tf-vs-bicep-state to remove the state's storage account.
• For Bicep, run az group delete -n rg-tf-vs-bicep from any folder.

View the slides

You can view the slides directly here.
If it doesn't work, or you want to run them locally, go to the slides folder from your terminal and run:

npm install
npm run dev

It will install the tooling (Slidev 🤩) and make the slides available at http://localhost:3030. Go check out Slidev's website to learn how it works !