IaC Best Practices on Azure

Adopting Infrastructure as Code is not just about choosing a tool — it requires disciplined practices around code organisation, testing, security, CI/CD integration, and governance. This lesson consolidates best practices for running IaC on Azure in production.

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1. Choose the Right Tool

Scenario	Recommended tool
Azure-only, Microsoft-native	Bicep
Multi-cloud or existing Terraform expertise	Terraform
One-off automation tasks	Azure CLI / PowerShell
General-purpose language preference	Pulumi
Configuration management (post-provisioning)	Ansible

Tip: Standardise on one primary IaC tool per team to reduce cognitive overhead and simplify CI/CD.

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2. Organise Your Code

Project Structure (Bicep)

infrastructure/
  main.bicep              # Entry point
  parameters/
    dev.bicepparam        # Dev parameters
    staging.bicepparam    # Staging parameters
    prod.bicepparam       # Production parameters
  modules/
    networking.bicep      # VNet, subnets, NSGs
    compute.bicep         # VMs, VMSS, App Service
    storage.bicep         # Storage accounts
    database.bicep        # SQL, Cosmos DB
    monitoring.bicep      # Log Analytics, App Insights

Project Structure (Terraform)