Bicep is a domain-specific language (DSL) for deploying Azure resources using declarative Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). Bicep simplifies ARM template authoring with cleaner syntax, better tooling, and improved type safety. Unlike verbose JSON, Bicep provides concise, readable resource definitions while compiling to ARM templates transparently. The key insight: Bicep uses symbolic names instead of string-based resource IDs, enabling strong type checking and IntelliSense — this makes cross-resource references natural and safe, drastically reducing deployment errors compared to traditional ARM JSON.