Are you investigating the deployment of your first production IT workload in Azure?

If so, start with Azure Infrastructure Services Implementation Guidelines. This new topic takes a step-by-step approach to the planning and design, providing guidance and best practices on many practical aspects of Azure IT workload deployment. Here are the steps:

1. Naming conventions
2. Subscriptions and accounts
3. Storage
4. Virtual networks
5. Cloud services
6. Availability Sets
7. Virtual machines

At the end of each step, an “Implementation guidelines recap” section highlights key design decisions and tasks, which you should complete before moving on to the next step.

By way of example, the Contoso Corporation wants to deploy a new financial services engine for its East Coast customers. The Example of an IT workload section uses the step-by-step process to determine:

1. A naming convention for the workload
2. The correct Azure subscription and administrative account
3. The set of storage accounts, and their types and names
4. The virtual network design
5. The set of cloud services and their names
6. The set of Availability Sets and their names
7. The set of virtual machines and their names

The result is this design:

If you have any feedback on this new topic or this approach on design and planning for Azure IT workloads, please comment on this blog post or leave Disqus comments on the Azure Infrastructure Services Implementation Guidelines topic.

Thank you.

Note: This new topic was adapted from the content in the Azure Implementation Guidelines blog post. Many thanks to Santiago Cánepa (Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft), Hugo Salcedo (Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft), and Greg Hinkel (Application Development Manager for Microsoft) for their excellent material, which hopefully I have improved upon.