If we have an Azure subscription, we can quickly access the entire SonarQube server using the SonarQube VM from the Azure Marketplace. Follow these steps to create a SonarQube VM in Azure:

1. In the Azure Marketplace, search and select the SonarQube image. The following screenshot shows the SonarQube page of the Marketplace:

Click on the Create button to get started.

2. In the VM form, on the Basics tab, select the Resource group and provide the Virtual machine name information, as shown in the following screenshot:

We can also change some optional VM options in the Disks and Networking tabs. Then, we validate these changes by clicking on the Review + create button.

3. At the end of the resource creation, in the Azure portal, we can view the status of the deployment, which, in this case, is successful:

4. To access the installed SonarQube server, view the details of the VM and get the Public IP address, as shown in the following screenshot:

5. Open a web browser with this IP address as a URL. The SonarQube authentication page will be displayed:

The default login is admin and is accessible via the VM boot diagnostics information, as indicated in the documentation (https://docs.bitnami.com/azure/faq/get-started/find-credentials/). The following screenshot shows how to perform password recovery via the Boot diagnostics:

6. Once authenticated, we can access the SonarQube dashboard:

In this section, we have looked at the architecture of SonarQube, along with details about the client and server components. Then, we looked at the different installation methods that are available and the configuration of SonarQube. In the next section, we will look at how developers can perform real-time code analysis using SonarLint before they commit their code.