Custom Bicep extensibility provider?

[justinmchase]

I'm seeing in the docs here how to import extensibility providers:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/bicep/bicep-import#import-namespaces-and-extensibility-providers-preview

It mentions a couple of providers, az, sys and kubernetes but its not entirely clear to me how one could make a provider.

For example my company has a number of internal resources that we have to manage on prem such as certificate creation, DNS registration, and some other on prem apis that we have to manage during deployments.

Right now they are totally separate part of the deployments just managed with scripts and whatnot. However it would be extremely compelling if they could be developed as Bicep resources and managed by bicep during the deployment.

Can anyone tell me what the status of custom providers is and point me to any documentation if available?

[justinmchase]

I see the new Radius project has forked this repo to get their extensibility to work. So I'm going to interpret that to mean that it will be possible to make custom extensibility providers but its not quite there yet.

[anthony-c-martin]

I've been working on a prototype for local extensibility here if you're interested in taking a look: https://github.com/anthony-c-martin/bicep-local-providers.

[justinmchase]

I mean this is awesome can't wait. But a couple of questions...

1. What is the meaning of "local-only"? I don't get it.

2. It looks like in the script handler it's doing some kind of state serialization and deserialization, where is that state stores? With kube and arm I get it but if my script, say, has state how do you store it, or do you not store it?

3. More of a recommendation but instead of giving a finite list of shells I would strongly recommend just giving a parameter for the interpreter and then shell execing it, youll never get a finite set of shells to work, imo.