Exploring provisioning options
When building solutions in Azure, the most obvious, and arguably easiest option, is to use the Azure portal.
Although this is great for the quick exploration of components, for learning, or even basic setup, using a manual hands-on approach is difficult to replicate with guaranteed consistency.
What we mean by this is the fact that any manual approach that involves a user clicking buttons or entering information cannot be easily repeated in a way that prevents mistakes from happening. In a traditional on-premises environment, solution builds might be verbosely documented so that other engineers can build the system by following step-by-step instructions.
The major problem with this, aside from the time it takes to write the documentation, is the fact that whoever is following the instructions could very easily enter some information incorrectly, misclick a button, or even miss entire steps.
This can be overcome by opting for a scripted environment...