Bicep Scenarios

I have been working with Bicep a lot on a recent project and I tweeted a reply to a tweet as you can see below, in order to reply properly I decided to write this blog post as hopefully being a way to give constructive feedback.

Lets take the example of vnet peering – if you google/bing for vnet peering bicep you will end up here most likely – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/templates/microsoft.network/virtualnetworks/virtualnetworkpeerings?pivots=deployment-language-bicep

This is somewhat helpful in terms of it shows you the format, however it wont help a lot of people as its not got any examples of how it works.

I always use https://github.com/Azure/ResourceModules as I can look at an example, they have deployment examples links for every resource which is like so: –

Now with this example I can see what the values look like and get a feel for what is needed. The first screen shot does explain the values which is ok at best, an example would be good, a common scenario would be even better.

When it comes to documentation examples can be what makes or breaks the documentation.
For me scenarios are the answer to what I would like to see – If I want to create a keyvault, theres every chance I need to create a secret and populate this, maybe I need an access policy or a managed identity to go along with this – these are real work scenarios that the documentation dont cover – yes we can’t cover everything but if we go back to the first screen shot above – this isnt helping me a great deal truth be told.

Now there is a common scenarios page from the Bicep team – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/bicep/scenarios-secrets which is a good start, I feel we really need a lot more of these or at least link to github repositories for further help.

When trying to figure out how to get a load balancer to play nicely with 2 virtual machines I had to manually depoy it and then reverse engineer the bicep – the sample in the documentation was a good start, didnt cover what I needed but it was a good start.

Ive had dm’s saying that there isnt enough people with enough time to write all of the scenario’s, which is fine, finding a way to make public contributions of example scenario;s might be one way to go about it.

Either way I feel there is room for improvement on the documentation for a lot of microsoft docs, its an unpopular opinion but there you have it.

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