Building an Azure Landing Zone with Bicep

When you start building new infrastructure in the cloud, the Landing Zone is the absolute foundation. It defines network boundaries, security policies, identity management, and the overall subscription architecture. Translating this complex design into code using Microsoft Bicep brings tremendous advantages over manually clicking through the Azure Portal.

Traditional ARM Templates vs. Bicep

Historically, we all struggled with massive, unreadable ARM templates in JSON format, where writing a simple for-loop was an all-day task. With Bicep, we get an incredibly clean syntax, transparent dependencies, and massive modularity.

Here's a simple example of how elegantly the code looks:

param location string = 'westeurope'
param environmentType string = 'prod'
 
// Create Resource Group
resource vnetRg 'Microsoft.Resources/resourceGroups@2021-04-01' = {
  name: 'rg-network-${environmentType}'
  location: location
}
 
// Virtual Network deployed as a called module
module hubVnet './modules/network.bicep' = {
  name: 'deploy-hub-vnet'
  scope: vnetRg
  params: {
    vnetName: 'vnet-hub-${location}'
    addressPrefix: '10.0.0.0/16'
  }
}

See how clean this is? Compared to a JSON definition, this is a massive step forward. We've gained type safety, full IntelliSense support in VS Code, and the ability to split complex monolithic code into hundreds of small, reusable logical units (e.g. hub.bicep, spoke.bicep, firewall.bicep, policies.bicep).

Key Principles for a Quality Implementation

1. Keep it D.R.Y. (Don't Repeat Yourself). If you notice you're copying the same code 3 times (say, for creating a Storage Account), turn it into a Bicep module immediately!
2. Strict Naming Convention: Follow the Cloud Adoption Framework abbreviation specifications (e.g. st for Storage, vnet for Virtual Network).
3. Linter Validation: Always let the linter check the quality of your file before running a deployment.

Conclusion and Next Steps

If you're starting to develop your Azure Landing Zone today, try to maintain code modularity from the very first commit. Don't try to solve everything in a single massive main.bicep file.

A huge next step for properly running modern Enterprise Architecture is connecting these templates directly into fully automated CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions – which will be the main topic of our upcoming article! This will eliminate the so-called "Works on my machine" principle and establish a true DevOps culture.