Are you tired of spending hours of your life manually setting up environments for your IT systems? Or do you skip that and try to make do with just a “dev” and “prod” environment because it is too much of a hassle to set up a new one? Or maybe it is too expensive to run another one? Or maybe you have given up on the idea of multiple environments and decided to just deploy to production?

Setting up and maintaining multiple environments and their infrastructure can be a hassle. However, with “the cloud” and infrastructure provisioning being available through API calls, we can speed up this process by using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This allows us to define our environments in code, and easily spin up, as well as remove, environments in minutes. Need a new test environment? No worries, just spin up a new one! Need a temporary environment to try out something new? Just spin up a new one and remove it when you have tried out your idea. Why not spin up a new environment for each pull request to verify that it works? All this is possible if you have your infrastructure defined as code.

In this 2-day seminar, we will look at the 3 most popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions available for creating infrastructure in Azure, namely Bicep, Terraform and Pulumi.

The goal of this hands-on seminar is to have you define, create, update, and remove whole system environments using all three IaC solutions. This will allow you to get a feel for how they work, where they differ, and which one would suit your situation the best. All three have strengths and weaknesses depending on what you are trying to do, so having a general knowledge of all three enables you to make a successful choice when you start your journey to define your infrastructure as code!

You will learn:

• To understand why IaC is useful in a cloud-based paradigm
• About various options for implementing Infrastructure as Code in Azure
• Get hands-on experience with all three of the most popular IaC tools
• To be able to make a well-educated decision about the best option for your company

Topics covered during the seminar:

• Introduction to Infrastructure as Code
• Declarative vs imperative approach to IaC
• Preventing configuration drift in Azure
• Bicep templates
• How it compares to ARM templates
• Getting started with Bicep
• Pulumi
• Pulumi architecture
• Language options
• Getting started with Pulumi
• Terraform
• Terraform architecture
• Terraform providers
• Getting started with Terraform
• Automating IaC deployments
• Deployment pipelines for IaC projects
• Short introduction to GitHub actions and Azure Pipelines
• Hands-on labs
• You will create and deploy the infrastructure for a sample application in Bicep, Terraform and Pulumi
• The infrastructure includes, among other things, Azure App Service, Azure SQL, Azure Key Vault and Application Insights

Attendee Workstation Requirements:
You must provide your own computer for this hands-on lab. Both Mac and Windows based computers will work fine. It needs a working microphone and speakers, as it is an on-line workshop. A webcam is also recommended, but not required.. The following technologies must be installed on the computer prior to the start of the Seminar on Tuesday, December 6th:

• An Azure subscription with owner privileges [Note: During the seminar we will create resources that will incur a small cost to you in Azure]
• Visual Studio Code
• Azure CLI