Customers around the world take advantage of Microsoft Azure to build, deploy, and manage business-critical applications at scale. We continuously innovate to help customers simplify their app deployment and management experience so they can spend more time building great solutions. Today, we are announcing several additional Azure infrastructure capabilities to help achieve this goal.

Simplify your declarative deployment experience in Azure with Bicep

With developers depending heavily on cloud infrastructure to run the apps they create, we continuously strive to simplify the infrastructure setup experience so they can stay focused on the actual innovation and experiences they are crafting within their apps. Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are extremely powerful; however, they can be complex. Bicep, an open-source, domain-specific language (DSL), further simplifies developers’ declarative deployment experience in Azure. Bicep makes it much easier to both read and write infrastructure-as-code in Azure.

Bicep allows customers to deploy Azure resources with many of the conveniences of modern programming languages—now indispensable to any app developer’s workflow. It supports first-class tooling with Visual Studio Code integration and has features such as type safety, modularity, and concise, readable syntax. Bicep is a transparent abstraction over ARM templates, which means everything you can do in ARM templates, you can do in Bicep. It also means that all Azure resource types are supported as soon as they are released, and there are no state files required. Since its v0.3 release in March, Bicep has been production-ready and supported by Microsoft Support plans.

With Bicep v0.4 available June 2, 2021, developers can enjoy better day-to-day authoring as well as overall quality and improved stability, with the following additional capabilities:

• A Bicep linter to catch a customizable set of authoring best practices. The linter is designed to be extensible so new rules can continue to be added over time by either the Bicep team or the community.
• Integration of new resource snippets as well as a “resource scaffolding” capability. Scaffolding will insert all required properties of any resource type to help you declare resources faster—even from scratch.
• Transition all our Bicep examples to the ARM Template QuickStart GitHub repo, giving us a richer testing suite to ensure Bicep examples are of the highest possible quality.

Learn more about Bicep and how to get started today.

Save time by using Elastic natively, right in the Azure portal

Our customers run large-scale mission-critical workloads with Linux and open source services on Azure. However, for these organizations’ developers, it is important to prioritize their focus on building amazing apps, not infrastructure management and maintenance—which can require technical knowledge and expertise in both specific services and Azure infrastructure overall. That’s why we partnered with Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana and Logstash, to reduce operational complexity by rolling out a native Azure experience.

Now in preview, you can find, deploy, and manage Elastic from within the Azure portal and start connecting your app and the Azure services you use with just a few clicks. The integration allows you to add powerful search and visualization capabilities to find information, monitor applications and workloads, and protect it all within your own Azure environment—while being able to gain the technical support from Elastic to help you troubleshoot. Additionally, billing management is also simplified and integrated with your Azure bill.

Learn more about the native Elastic integration with Azure and check out our in-depth blog post, “Search made simple: native Elastic integration with Azure—now in preview.”

Increase efficiency and onboard more easily with additional Azure Monitor capabilities

Many customers use Azure Monitor to track the health of their applications, diagnose issues, optimize performance, and create an efficient environment from coding to shipping. The following capabilities in Azure Monitor provide customers with greater flexibility, improved sharing, and end-to-end diagnostics to make managing Azure resources easier across the board:

• Azure Monitor Agent and data collection rules, in preview, greatly simplify the customer experience as well as improving flexibility when collecting logs and metrics from managed resources. In addition, as part of the agent, there is multi-homing on Linux and Windows and event filtering. And coming soon are new capabilities, part of general availability, that includes support for private links and direct proxies for advance networking scenarios.
• The ability to create and share query packs of log analytics queries within your organization, now in preview, allows for easier collaboration between teams.
• Enhanced out-of-the-box observability for your cloud resources, with auto instrumentation of more app types, is now in preview. You can now automatically onboard Java apps on both Linux and Windows App Services to application insights without making any code changes, providing easy access to application performance monitoring for app diagnostics and optimization.

View more details on Microsoft Tech Community and learn more about additional updates for Azure Monitor.

Learn more

These are just a few of the innovations we highlighted at Microsoft Build this week. You can read more—including about Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI—in our opening day blog, “Build cloud-native applications that run anywhere.” And whether you are attending live or planning to access content on-demand, we hope you will check out all the Microsoft Build infrastructure sessions, including our Build consistent hybrid and multicloud applications with Azure Arc session. Thank you for joining us at Microsoft Build.

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