As you may already know, Azure is a public cloud computing platform created by Microsoft. There are three main categories of computers that Microsoft Azure offers, and they are as follows:
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
- Platform as a service (PaaS)
- Software as a service (SaaS)
ConfigMgr in an IaaS model is simply a VM with the ConfigMgr application installed on it.
As for the PaaS model, there is no real scenario for ConfigMgr; however, the SaaS approach has its use case for ConfigMgr in the form of cloud-based distribution points.
As mentioned earlier, starting from the 1511 version, ConfigMgr supports deployment in Azure. Leveraging this option, we get three options:
- ConfigMgr might be placed in Azure and manage cloud-based VMs
- ConfigMgr might be placed in Azure but manage on-premise VMs
- ConfigMgr might be placed in Azure only to some extent, which means only certain roles, such as distribution point, are deployed on the cloud
When it comes to the prerequisites, scaling, and sizing--the same applies to the cloud as the on-premise deployments.
To start using Azure to deploy ConfigMgr VMs, you need a subscription that is charged based on the number of virtual machines and Azure resource usage.
A cloud-based distribution point is a slightly different approach. It is not a VM but a service in Azure, which is automatically scaling for the needs. It supports your internal and external (internet) clients. Similar to the preceding solutions, you need an Azure subscription.