In previous chapters, you’ve learned a lot about the Azure Resource Manager, ARM templates, and Bicep. You’ve used different tools, like PowerShell and the Azure CLI, to interact with ARM. And you have used those tools to deploy templates to Azure manually. By deploying manually, however, there are no enforcements, checks, or policies in place to control the quality of the Bicep templates. Mistakes can easily be made, and this would allow developers to potentially break the production environment.
Also, working manually with the CLI means that someone needs to log in to Azure to deploy a template. That means at least one person has enough permissions on the production environment to potentially break it, and it would be best if that were not the case.
So far, you’ve probably stored all the templates you created while reading this book on your local system, and you’ve deployed them from there. If developers in a real company working on the same infrastructure were to do that, copying files back and forth, they would risk overwriting newer versions of files with older versions. It is safer to use a version control system.