Let's talk PaaS

When looking at migrating to Azure, sometimes, you need to look past moving the virtual machine to Azure, as you can just move the service itself. Because we are looking at migration and not wholesale code changes, let's pick on some low hanging fruit.  In most organizations, you have web applications that usually have databases like SQL to support them. So, for this exercise, let's say that we have virtual machines we want to move—one has two websites and the other has two SQL databases. Instead of moving the two virtual machines, you could just move the websites and databases to Azure as instances.  The websites would be deployed to App Services, which is Azure's "IIS" for hosting web applications. Databases would either be migrated to a database instance within an Azure Server resource or through managed instances, which is used to maintain a prior or specific version of SQL.  We will dive deeper into this within the next chapter, as well as discuss cost, just looking to start building a quick virtual machine based on understanding. Let's look at how this changes the ARM template. Because the PowerShell is generic, we are not going to review that one again.