Abstract

Azure includes many wonderful Platform as a Service (PaaS) options, such as Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database, that can provide geoscaling and fast agility. This chapter explains the various Azure Virtual Machines (VM) options and how to deploy and configure Windows Server and Linux VMs in Azure. Each Azure region consists of multiple data centers; each data center consists of thousands of hardware blade servers. Microsoft supports Windows Client VM images in Azure only for development purposes. Perhaps the fastest way to deploy a VM in Azure is to do so from the Azure Marketplace. At a higher level of abstraction, an Azure virtual machine is a cloud resource that consists of the following three subsystems: compute, storage and network. Scalabilityrefers to developers ability to resize their VM. Configuration management in the Azure cloud is essentially the same as it is on premises.