If you want to run your services within Azure and Microsoft has no Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for that specific service, it is necessary to implement an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution in your environment.

Azure VMs is the IaaS offer from Azure. With VMs (based on Windows or Linux) you have the flexibility to realize your own workloads. These workloads include, in addition to the ability to deploy applications in the cloud, development and testing scenarios and also some enterprise workloads based on Red Hat, Ubuntu, SAP, IBM, and a lot more.

The basic idea behind this offer we now know, but how should we start now? If we look at the whole from the viewpoint of the software architect, the answer is relatively simple: we have to do some planning tasks.

The tasks are as follows:

• Define the workloads for your application and the resources that the VMs need
• Determine the resource requirements for each virtual machine with the appropriate size and storage type of the virtual machines
• Define resource groups for the different levels and components of your infrastructure
• Define a naming convention for your virtual machines and resources (optional, but highly recommended for complex deployments)

For most of this task, I cannot provide any further explanations since they are determined solely by your personal needs within your solution. For the determine resource requirements task,  I would like to provide you with some background information.

To complete this task, you should consider the following two questions:

• How many virtual machines do you need for the various application levels of your infrastructure?
• What CPU and memory resources must each VM have and what memory requirements are available?

Question 1, I can unfortunately not answer for you, because the correct answer here also depends on your personal needs. As for question 2, I also cannot give a real answer, but at least I can show you the way you can find a suitable answer for you.

To answer the question for you, you need to know the different sizes and features of the virtual machines. In other words, you have to deal with the VM types.

Since Microsoft supports a broad portfolio of workloads, Microsoft also offers you a wide range of different VM types. Which VM types are available is determined by the so-called Azure series.