AZ400-Q: Bicep vs ARM templates
Q: A team wants to declare Azure resources as code and needs Microsoft’s recommended, concise language that compiles to an ARM template and is fully supported natively in Azure. Which should they choose?
- A) Bicep ✓
- B) PowerShell DSC
- C) Ansible
- D) Terraform
Answer: A. Bicep is a domain-specific language that is declarative and transpiles to a standard ARM template (JSON) for deployment — it is Microsoft’s recommended IaC language for Azure, is natively supported, and has no state file to manage. Terraform is cross-cloud (also valid in Azure) but not the Microsoft-native/ARM-compiled option; DSC and Ansible focus on configuration, not declarative ARM-style provisioning.
Why it helps
Recommending Bicep vs ARM vs Terraform for Azure provisioning is a direct “use Bicep & ARM” AZ-400 objective.