Provisioning Microsoft Azure instances

Now that we have a solid understanding of using Chef to turn our EC2 cloud infrastructure into code, it is easy to deploy and manage. Let's see how we can do that using Microsoft's cloud hosting provider service, Azure. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, Azure is the fastest growing cloud provider, currently with about 12 percent of the cloud hosting market. As with Amazon, Microsoft offers a free trial of the service, so you can test out how things work for you with a real-life proof of concept.

At the time of writing this chapter, Microsoft Azure has multiple personalities. By this, I mean that Microsoft has created a newer fresh version of their Azure user interface, that is, Portal. Portal has a new domain name and a new cleaner, customizable UI. Along with this new UI, there is a new deployment model named Resource Manager. You may see this referred to as Azure Resource Manager. The older UI and deployment model, Azure Service Management, is...