Provisioning VMs in Azure

Although – as mentioned in the previous chapter – Platform as a Service (PaaS) services are becoming more popular, there are certainly times when you need more flexibility and control over your environment than PaaS can offer. Azure VMs provide the flexibility that virtualization offers, without the need to manage your own underlying infrastructure. As you will know by now, the management activities of VMs – such as installing software, patching, and configuration – are for you to perform.

Because of the flexibility that VMs offer, they can often be the logical choice for various scenarios, such as rapidly building and destroying development and test environments, providing quick and convenient means to scale environments should they be needed. Other scenarios might include high-performance computing (HPC) for complex computational workloads, as well as extending your existing infrastructure by connecting your corporate network...