Setup your SharePoint 2013 Farm in Microsoft Azure with just a few clicks

~~Windows~~ Microsoft Azure recently announced the feature where they explained the ability to create a full blown SharePoint Farm environment for either development or actual production use.

With SharePoint Server Farm, the Microsoft Azure Preview Portal automatically creates a pre-configured SharePoint Server 2013 farm for you. This can save you a lot of time when you need a basic or high-availability SharePoint farm for a development and testing environment or if you are evaluating SharePoint Server 2013 as a collaboration solution for your organization.

Further documentation is available on Microsoft Azure site

Creating a SharePoint 2013 Farm in Microsoft Azure is literally a couple of clicks away. The new option provides a new template along with others (such as Ubuntu, SQL Server Standard 2014 etc.) for creating a SharePoint Server Farm.

The next step after selecting the SharePoint Server template is to provide the necessary mandatory fields such as Resource Group, Default User Name and Password.

Azure Resource Manager allows you to group multiple resources as a logical group which serves as the lifecycle boundary for every resource contained within it. Typically a group will contain resources related to a specific application.

And that’s actually it. Literally and just two clicks in Azure Portal, you have a working SharePoint Server Farm ready for use. If you select the resource group in Azure Portal, you would see something like this and following resources (VMs, Virtual Network etc.) would have been created for you.

Optional

Of course, you can further fine tune the default setup by changing the default host name prefix, administrator account, passwords, MSDN Subscription for Azure or even the location of resources or affinity group.