[nickspag]

Bicep is fantastic. But it compiles to ARM, so it's still limited by ARM's weaknesses and gaps, in addition to the underlying general instability of Azure and the inconsistencies from the Resource Providers. As well, Bicep is declarative- which is elegant in theory, but the stateful design of Terraform can cover up some of those underlying ARM/Azure gaps in practice. The deployment stacks approach on Azure should help further, but there's still a long way to go.

[k8svet]

This just makes it even more asinine that they had to invent their own language. I'm sure I'd be just as productive with Nix and builtins.toJSON. At least they didn't do jsonnet, eh?

[FridgeSeal]

MS/Azure just seems to have this weird obsession with Not-Invented-Here-ing things that didn’t need to be nih-ed, and their solutions are often…extraordinarily Microsoft.

“Use our weird language, to interact with our awful, slow API’s, nobody else uses it, our support probably doesn’t know it exists, and it’ll be full of weird, MS culture specific idioms and eldritch code that compiles down into our previous failed experiment”

Like, no? No thank you, can’t you just be normal?

[nickspag]

I don't know if I'd go that far. It's pretty easy to go from ARM to Bicep. And Bicep is genuinely better at everything ARM does and has a wider breadth of features as a DSL- and that is genuinely valuable. It was always going to have to be back compatible/compile to ARM: moving off it has to start somewhere.

re: nix, it does infra?