# Creating Automated Microsoft Bicep Application Infrastructure from GitHub in the Azure Cloud
## 3 Project Overview and Objectives
### Goals of Automated Deployment
* Collaboration: Developers and operations teams are enabled to work together on a single source of truth for infrastructure, fostering shared ownership and reducing silos. The adoption of IaC empowers developers to contribute directly to infrastructure definitions without relying solely on DevOps engineers. Documentation, comments, and a clear module structure lower the barrier to entry for team members with different backgrounds. Git-based workflows further encourage collaboration by integrating infrastructure into the same review and release processes as application code. This cultural shift supports agile methodologies and enhances organizational agility. * Cost Control: The creation of appropriately sized environments is supported, avoiding overprovisioning and enabling easier teardown of unused resources. Automation allows teams to rapidly provision ephemeral environments for testing, which can be destroyed automatically when no longer needed. Parameters and templates include options to define SKU sizes, storage tiers, and scaling rules, helping teams correctly size their infrastructure. Cost tracking tags are also integrated to provide better visibility into resource usage across environments. Over time, this improves budgeting accuracy and aligns cloud expenditure with actual operational needs. By achieving these goals, the project demonstrates how modern DevOps principles can be practically applied to infrastructure management in Azure, using tools that are accessible to teams with varying levels of cloud expertise. It also provides a model that can be scaled up or adapted to meet the needs of larger organizations with more complex compliance, security, or governance requirements [20]. To enhance the clarity and practical applicability of the proposed goals, and to support potential future evaluations (e.g., KPI tracking or empirical validation), we introduce a weighted prioritization scheme. Each goal is assigned a relative importance score on a scale from 1 (lowest priority) to 5 (highest priority), reflecting its impact on the reliability, security, and maintainability of automated infrastructure in cloud-native environments. This prioritization serves multiple purposes:  
* It guides readers in understanding which aspects of the design were most critical to the authors. * It enables teams seeking to implement similar architectures to focus their resources strategically. * It lays the foundation for potential quantitative assessment of goal achievement in future extensions of the project. Table 2 summarizes the relative weights and justifications for each goal. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Goal** & **Description** & **Weight (1–5)** & **Rationale** \\ \hline
**Security** & Protection of credentials, access control, private networking & 5 & Critical for compliance and trust in production systems \\ \hline
**Consistency** & Ensuring identical deployments across environments & 5 & Foundation for reproducibility and environment parity \\ \hline
**Automation** & Fully automated deployment and teardown workflows & 5 & Enables CI/CD and reduces human error \\ \hline
**Maintainability** & Modular structure, easy updates and reviews & 4 & Important for long-term evolution and code quality \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Prioritization of deployment goals based on importance for CI/CD infrastructure.