Week 14 - Infrastructure as Code

Why use Infrastructure as Code

IaC concepts

Azure Bicep

Bicep in practice

Deploy Bicep from CI/CD

Practice

Assignment

Gotchas & Pitfalls

Glossary: Week 14

Career relevance: Week 14

History of IaC

• Going Further

Slides (PDF)

Career relevance: Week 14

This page answers two questions students ask every week: why am I learning this, and how does it help me find a job?

It is scoped to Week 14 content (Infrastructure as Code on Azure with Bicep). Other weeks' career pages each cover their week's tool. Generic NL junior data-career content (salary bands, day-to-day work, what employers do not expect from juniors) lives in one shared page across the curriculum and is not repeated here.

The numbers below are measured from a private NL jobs crawl (active listings as of July 2026): skill tags for Terraform / Bicep / "Infrastructure as Code", broken down by role. Round figures; treat them as market signal, not precision. Bicep is rarely stored as its own skill tag (ads often say "Terraform" or "IaC" even in Azure shops), so the "any IaC" column is the fairer hiring signal for this week.

How IaC shows up in NL postings

Data platform engineer titles exist (~20 active) but are almost never junior (0 junior/trainee in this extract). On those titles, Terraform shows up more often than on general DE (~30%+). Cloud / Azure platform engineer titles lean even harder on IaC and Kubernetes.

What this means in practice: IaC is core literacy for every DE, and a hiring filter for platform / DevOps roles, but it is usually a plus on junior DE ads, not the headline skill next to SQL / Python / Azure / Databricks. Week 14 clears the junior bar: deploy from a file, preview with what-if, keep secrets out, tear down.

Bicep vs alternatives in NL

NL Azure shops mix three IaC stories:

• Bicep / ARM templates: native to Azure. Common inside Microsoft-centric banks, insurers, consultancies, and public-sector Azure tenants. Postings may say "ARM templates" even when teams have moved to Bicep. Skill tags under-count this; look for the phrase in the ad body.
• Terraform (HashiCorp): the multi-cloud default and the name that appears most often in skill lists. Still common inside Azure-only teams that standardized early on Terraform.
• Pulumi / CDK / Crossplane: smaller volume; appear at modern platform teams. Useful to recognize, not required for junior DE roles.
• Azure Portal / click-ops only: still real at smaller companies. Those postings usually do not list IaC; bringing Bicep to the interview is still a differentiator ("I can make our staging environment reproducible").

Practical implication: for this Data Track (Azure-first), Bicep is the right CV lead. If a posting asks for Terraform, say you know declarative IaC on Azure and can transfer; do not pretend multi-cloud production Terraform experience you do not have. Optional depth: IaC tool landscape.

Junior vs medior expectations for IaC

Postings phrase the expectation differently by level:

• Junior / trainee / graduate: "familiarity with Infrastructure as Code", "exposure to Terraform or Bicep", "willing to learn cloud provisioning". A working Bicep deploy into a real Azure resource group (this week's assignment) clears that bar.
• Medior (3-5 yrs): "hands-on IaC in production", modules, CI deploy of templates, secret hygiene (Key Vault), preview/plan before apply. The Week 14 ladder (module + @secure() + what-if + teardown) is the vocabulary; months of real deploys build the depth.
• Senior / data platform engineer: landing zones, policy-as-code, multi-subscription topologies. Out of scope for this week, and almost never an entry title for trainees.

A common pattern on junior DE roles in Azure shops is "Terraform or Bicep is a plus." Showing a PR with a successful deploy and a short write-up flips that plus into evidence.

How Week 14 work signals on a CV

Strongest single line after this week:

Authored Azure Bicep templates (parameters, modules, secure params) to provision storage into a shared resource group; previewed changes with what-if and tore resources down after use.

That sentence carries recruiter keywords (Azure, Bicep, IaC, modules, what-if) and one maturity signal (teardown / cost hygiene). Weaker alternative to avoid: "Played with the Azure portal and Bicep," which says nothing about reviewable, repeatable deploys.

If you also completed optional CI evidence (workflow + what-if job log) or the out-of-week Bonus AI enrichment, keep those on separate lines so the IaC signal stays crisp.

Interview phrasing for the Week 14 assignment

When an interviewer asks "how do you provision cloud resources?", three sentences cover the assignment cleanly:

1. "I stopped clicking the portal for repeatable setups and wrote Bicep templates that declare the desired state, then deployed them with the Azure CLI into a shared resource group."
2. "I split a resource into a module, used a secure parameter for a dummy secret, and ran what-if before apply so I could see the diff."
3. "When I removed a resource from the file, I learned deploys are additive, so I deleted the live resource explicitly instead of expecting the template to clean it up."

Honest "what would you do differently?" follow-ups:

• "For real secrets I would reference Key Vault instead of passing values on the CLI."
• "For multi-cloud or mixed AWS/Azure teams I would evaluate Terraform; for Azure-only I would stay on Bicep."
• "Next I would run the same az deployment group create (and what-if) from CI on merge, the same review-then-deploy habit as application pipelines." (You practice that shape in Deploy Bicep from CI/CD.)

What Week 14 does not make you

Useful when reading senior Azure / platform postings:

• You are not yet a landing-zone / subscription architect.
• You have not shipped production CI that gates every infra PR with policy-as-code.
• You are not expected to claim deep Terraform multi-cloud production experience from one Azure-native week.
• You are not applying to "Data Platform Engineer" as a first junior title in this market; that ladder usually comes after DE experience.

You are someone who can explain drift, deploy a small stack from a file, preview changes, and clean up after yourself: that is the junior IaC bar this week targets.

Sources

• Private NL jobs crawl (active listings, July 2026): jobmatch skill tags on matched/missing skills; role from classifications / title heuristics. DevOps row is the closest proxy for cloud / platform engineer titles in this extract.
• Microsoft Learn: What is Infrastructure as Code?
• Bicep overview

<aside> 💭 For generic NL junior data-career content (salary bands, day-to-day work, what employers do not expect from any junior), one shared page across all weeks is the right home. That page does not exist yet; for now, treat this page as Week-14-specific only.

</aside>

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