Terraform vs Azure Bicep: Which IaC is Best for You

Every business seeks better security, agility, and technical support. Cloud infrastructure provides all these benefits to small businesses as well as successful ones. You might be planning to shift to cloud platforms to optimize your business operations by choosing between Terraform and Azure Bicep. Making the right choice is critical to your business’s success.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the cutting-edge revolution brought to the domain of cloud computing. Terraform and Azure Bicep are the major divisions of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) which come with their own set of pros and cons.

This article will highlight the overview and benefits of Terraform and Azure Bicep which businesses can utilize to choose the best option for them.

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows businesses to use coding and automation to manage servers, operating systems, database connections, storage, and other infrastructure components without the hassle of dealing with manual configuration. With IaC, you can easily create and configure infrastructure components by simply editing, copying, and distributing infrastructure specifications located in the configuration files.

Terraform

Terraform open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool used to define both on-premises and cloud resources. Terraform allows developers to build and edit computing instances, storage, networking, DNS entries, and SaaS services.

All developers need is to create the configurations to define or modify the underlying resources and then apply these configurations to the resources.

Azure Bicep

Now Azure resources can be deployed using a declarative domain-specific language called Azure Bicep. Developers no longer have to deal with the issues of traditional scripting if they opt for Azure Bicep to fully automate infrastructure deployment. With Azure Bicep, developers face minimal deployment time errors due to its simplified syntax.

Which One Is the Best for You?

It primarily depends on your business needs and resources whether you choose Azure Bicep or Terraform.

If you are planning for deployments on more than one cloud, then Terraform is the right option with its ability to offer reusable configurations for multiple environments and easier rollbacks for most infrastructure configurations. With Terraform, you can communicate with many different clouds and IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments.

If your business has no prior experience in dealing with Azure infrastructure deployments, then Azure Bicep is the right option because of its simplified syntax and the presence of ARM template features in it.