I spent some time today getting to grips with the pricing structures on Azure in terms of putting together a proof of concept for running a Liferay application in our Azure PoC environments. Liferay is a Java-based CMS running a Postgres database, on an Apache Tomcat server and interestingly, Elasticsearch. I have previously setup a small Java microservice on Azure before and enjoyed the experience, so this has been an interesting exercise.

At present, the decision we face is how to set the stack up. The options as I see them are:

• Run the application in a VM with a Bitnami Liferay image as well as an Elasticsearch image. I am not sure this will be cost-effective since the team is already under a lot of pressure and running their own stack within the VM might not be the best option.
• Manually set the stack up inside a VM, however, this may also be a challenge since the team is not experienced in devops culture and running what gets built.
• Find a way to run the app inside an App Service with a managed instance of Postgres along with blob storage and a CDN.

I am still investigating the options, but I am excited about the possibilities and options for expanding my Azure knowledge further!