Introduction

  • 2 minutes

When you automate your Bicep deployments by using Azure Pipelines, you create a consistent and reusable process for managing your Azure resources. Over time, your pipeline becomes the only way that changes can be made to your Azure environment. It's important to ensure that your pipeline enforces quality checks before, during, and after each deployment.

In this module, you'll learn how to extend your pipeline to add validation, checks, and tests. By doing verifications, you'll build confidence that your deployments meet your quality standards.

Example scenario

Suppose you're the Azure administrator at a toy company. You've been working with your website team to create a Bicep template that deploys and configures the Azure resources for your company's main website. You've recently also been creating a pipeline to deploy the Bicep file automatically.

Recently, you and your team have made several changes to your website's Bicep files that included mistakes. You're worried that one day these mistakes might cause a production outage. You want to add testing to your Bicep deployment pipeline to ensure that each deployment has the best chance of succeeding.

What will you be doing?

In this module, you'll learn how you can test your Bicep code within your Azure DevOps pipeline. When your pipeline runs, you'll immediately get feedback on the changes that were made to your Bicep files.

You'll add linting to ensure the quality of your Bicep code, and preflight deployment validation to increase the chance that your deployments will succeed. You'll also use the what-if operation to add a manual approval step to your pipeline. After deployment, you'll verify your environment by running more tests.

What's the main goal?

After you complete this module, you'll be able to update your Bicep deployment pipeline with validation and tests that help to ensure the quality of your Azure environment.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with using:

  • Bicep, including creating and deploying basic files.
  • Azure, including the Azure portal, subscriptions, resource groups, and resources.
  • Basic Git commands, including cloning, committing files, and pushing changes to Azure Repos.
  • Basic YAML pipelines through Azure Pipelines, including service connections.

To work through the exercises in the module, you'll need:

  • An Azure account with the ability to create resource groups, Microsoft Entra applications, and service principals.
  • An Azure DevOps organization and account.

You'll also need the following installed locally: