In this article I am going to run through how to provision Sitecore 9 XP on Microsoft Azure in a PaaS configuration. This is probably the most common scenario for deploying Sitecore to the cloud however it can easily be configured based on size and topology.
First things
Since Sitecore 6.3 there has been Microsoft Azure support through the separate Sitecore Azure Module. This allowed deploying Sitecore sites onto Azure Cloud Services. It required an on-premise management instance from which you could manage Azure farms. While it worked in some scenarios it lacked support for common Sitecore