Cloud computing has been a buzzword in the IT industry for some time, and there are several cloud providers on the market. Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud offering. Microsoft Azure has evolved very quickly over the last few years and now offers a comprehensive set of services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In this book, we will start by explaining what is meant by some cloud terminology. We will take a look at how we can deploy both Windows/Linux-based virtual machines in Azure. We will take a look at how to set up a virtual network, so that our cloud- based resources can communicate with each other. Much like an on-premises server, our cloud-based servers will need to be monitored for any potential issues, and we will take a look at how we can design cloud systems that are both highly available and fault-tolerant.