Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is probably the next (or current) big thing in computing that is here to stay in the future of software and services. With PaaS, companies can abstract their services from the underlying IT infrastructure, investing the majority of the effort in the core business instead of managing several building blocks, often with repetitive actions and operations.

However, Azure is not just PaaS, and in this chapter, we are going to use IaaS instead. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a model-provisioning IT low-level infrastructure (such as virtual machines) that works without having to manage the entire stack as it takes place on-premise.

A figure showing what customers manage (blue) in different scenarios.

In this chapter, we present the first scenario of the book, where a fictional company wants to start up, minimizing the initial IT investment as well as the time to market. We learn how several Azure building blocks (such as virtual machines, Visual Studio Online, Azure Resource Manager, RemoteApp, Azure Storage, among others) can be combined in order to provide a set of foundation platforms for a software development company.