Getting Started on Azure – Building Solutions with Azure Virtual Machines

Now that we’ve built our solution end-to-end on the AWS platforms and followed our team’s journey from their initial VM architecture to Kubernetes and then finally culminating with serverless, we’re ready to switch gears and enter an alternate reality where Keyser has saddled up to his dear friends at Microsoft. In this next set of chapters, we will follow a similar path as in Chapters 7 through 9, but in this alternate version, we’ll work with Microsoft Azure.

This chapter will pick up where we started our journey on AWS; in Chapter 7, where we built a doppelgänger solution using AWS. In that chapter, we went into great detail about elements of the solution that are 100% cloud agnostic. This included a detailed explanation of exactly how we use Packer to provision our .NET-based application code to a Linux VM and a detailed explanation of how to set up GitHub Actions for a VM-based CI/CD pipeline.

Since an overwhelming majority of this remains the same when we move to Azure, we won’t be revisiting these topics in this chapter at the same length. However, I would encourage you to put a bookmark in Chapter 7 and reference it frequently.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Laying the foundation
• Designing the solution
• Building the solution
• Automating the deployment