Terraform vs Bicep vs clicking in the portal?
asked 3 months ago84 viewsen
Our small team creates cloud resources manually in the portal. Everyone says "use Infrastructure as Code". Is it worth it for a small team, and which tool?
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1 Answer
Yes, even for a small team. The portal is fine for exploring; IaC is for anything you'd need to recreate:
- Reproducible environments: a staging identical to production, and disaster recovery in minutes. - Review and history: infrastructure changes go through pull requests, and git blame tells you why the firewall rule exists. - No drift: you know exactly what's deployed.
Tool choice: - Terraform / OpenTofu: multi-cloud, huge ecosystem (Cloudflare, GitHub, Datadog providers). The default if you might touch more than one provider. - Bicep: Azure-only, first-class Azure support on day one, no state file to manage. - Pulumi / AWS CDK: IaC in TypeScript, Python or C# if your team prefers real code.
Start small: import one existing environment, put the state in remote storage with locking, and run plan in CI on every PR.
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