IaC Zoology

Infrastructure-as-Code has had its fair share of tech standards. Let's look at them.

• Terraform - multi-cloud, open-source Infrastructure-as-Code tool that works across AWS, Azure, GCP and more

For Microsoft landscape only, we have:

• ARM templates - Azure's native JSON-based IaC format, verbose but powerful. Many companies still have ARM templates in their arsenal, even though it's time has come
• Bicep - domain-specific language (DSL) for Azure (where said domain is IaC, or more broadly "declarative deployment of Azure resources") that simplifies ARM templates with cleaner syntax. A good one if you are not hybrid-clouding

Introducing the Azure SRE Agent

The new Azure SRE agent (announced May 2025) and demonstrated at MS Build, is designed to make it easier to "sustain production environments". This includes taking toil away from checking log files, analyzing historical changes and augmenting this with LLMs. Incident and infrastructure management is set to be transformed, with the Azure SRE agent able to partner in incident investigation and root cause analysis. An example prompt may be: "visualize HTTP request and 500 errors for last week for my app".