How does Azure Bicep stack up against other players in the IaC turf war?

Azure Bicep was developed, by Microsoft, as a logical improvement over the older, cumbersome and, quite frankly, tedious ARM templates that are used to deploy resources in Azure. Azure Bicep was created to work only on Azure cloud and, in that vein, its only logical competitor would be Terraform (Hashicorp). While Ansible (RedHat) is also capable of deploying resources, but it is more known as a tool for configuration management.

As an organization using Azure cloud as its cloud service provider, if one is habituated in using ARM templates for resource deployment automation, then adopting Azure Bicep makes great sense. Granted, that there will a learning curve with a different syntactical structure to that of ARM, it makes sense because the Bicep templates would be converted to ARM templates when the Bicep code is executed (transpiled) and Azure deploys the resources using those ARM templates. However, if you are used to, as an organization, using Terraform as your go to IaC solution, and now, you are making the call of switching to Bicep, then we have take into account the following factors.

1. The Bicep syntax bears some similarity with that of Terraform. That could aid you switch but mind you, it is not identical. There will be a learning curve.
2. However, both language offers language helpers to aid coding tasks.
3. Both language support modularity. Modules enable the reuse of code.
4. With both, a developer has the facility of validating the configuration before deployment and then applying the changes post validation.
5. Both Terraform and Bicep offers a Visual Studio extension to provide a rich authoring experience.
6. As a deeply integrated-with-Azure service, Bicep offers an advantage over Terraform in that, any new Azure service/feature is immediately available for deployment via Bicep whereas it takes days for Terraform to integrate that with its code base.
7. Microsoft offers full support to Bicep and any issues are resolved way faster than issues Terraform has with Azure.
8. Terraform stores state information about your managed infrastructure and configuration whereas Bicep is incremental in nature.
9. With Bicep, processing occurs within the core Azure infrastructure service side and with Terraform, processing is done within the Terraform client.?
10. One major advantage that Bicep has over Terraform is the ability to automate portal actions. With Bicep, you can use the Azure portal to export templates.
11. Out-of-band configuration changes are changes made to a device configuration outside the context of the tool.?When an environment involves frequent out-of-band changes, Bicep is more user-friendly. When you use Terraform, you should minimize out-of-band changes.

While Terraform has a greater adoption rate in the industry mainly because it has been around for a while, Bicep has seen steady adoption in recent times, probably because there had been a sizable portion of the industry using ARM and despite the learning curve, are switching to Azure Bicep. Microsoft is also working hard to iron out any bugs and with its support function, trying to make it into an exemplary and industry dominant product.

However, in the multi-cloud realm, Bicep loses out to Terraform because of its Azure Native/centric focus. Terraform, with its support for almost every cloud product available in the market, remains the IaC tool of choice for multi-cloud deployments.