# Creating Automated Microsoft Bicep Application Infrastructure from GitHub in the Azure Cloud
## 1 Introduction  
Cloud computing has transformed how organizations design, deploy, and operate software systems. By providing on-demand, scalable resources and managed services, cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure enable teams to accelerate delivery cycles, reduce infrastructure costs, and focus on delivering business value. As cloud adoption has grown, so too has the complexity of managing cloud resources consistently and securely across multiple environments. The approach has been chosen because it enables a highly flexible and efficient deployment model that aligns with the evolving needs of modern software engineering teams. In many development and testing contexts, there is a clear requirement to provision complete environments--including networking components, databases, containerized applications, and supporting services--in a matter of minutes with minimal manual intervention. By adopting a declarative, code-driven infrastructure definition combined with automatedCI/CD workflows, this approach allows teams to reliably and predictably deploy infrastructure on demand. Equally important, it supports the rapid and secure decommissioning of resources when they are no longer required, helping to control cloud costs and reduce operational complexity. This ephemeral infrastructure model adheres to best practices for treating infrastructure as disposable and reproducible, facilitating experimentation while ensuring consistent configurations across environments. The integration of Azure Bicep with GitHub Actions was specifically selected to deliver this level of flexibility while maintaining strong security controls, role-based access management, and environment-specific parameterization across development, QA, and production stages [1; 2]. Traditionally, infrastructure provisioning was a manual and error-prone process. Engineers would create resources via web portals or CLI commands, often with limited standardization or documentation. This approach resulted in slow, inconsistent, and difficult-to-reproduce deployments. Manual configuration increased the risk of security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, while making it challenging to maintain parity between development, testing, and production environments. As organizations adopted DevOps practices to shorten release cycles and enhance software quality, the need for automation and repeatability in infrastructure management became increasingly clear. Infrastructure as code has emerged as a core DevOps practice through which to address these challenges. The programmable infrastructure enables teams to define cloud infrastructure declaratively using code files that can be version-controlled, reviewed, and tested like application code. By codifying infrastructure, teams can ensure consistent deployments, simplify rollback and disaster recovery processes, and facilitate collaboration across development and operations. Popular tools include AWS CloudFormation, HashiCorp Terraform, and Azure's ARM templates. Each tool has trade-offs in terms of complexity, ease of use, and integration with specific cloud providers. Within the Azure ecosystem, Bicep has become a modern alternative to traditional ARM JSON templates. Bicep is a domain-specific language (DSL) for declarative provisioning of Azure resources. It improves on ARM templates by providing a more concise, readable, and modular syntax while maintaining full compatibility with the Azure Resource Manager. Bicep enables teams to split complex deployments into reusable modules, parameterize environments, and support infrastructure definitions as first-class code artifacts. By reducing boilerplate and improving maintainability, Bicep lowers the barrier to adopting automated infrastructure provisioning on Azure [2; 3; 4]. At the same time, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) have become essential for modern software development.