There are plenty of resources to be used in Azure when it comes to IaaS workloads, from the areas of computing, networking, and storage. Plenty of vendors also offer customized solutions for Azure in the Azure marketplace. These range from appliances, such as a Fortinet gateway, to WordPress instances.

Each resource that you deploy is uniquely referenced by a GUID, as are your subscriptions and resource groups. This way, you can always identify each of your resources.

Your method for deploying resources depends on the Azure environment that you are using. Are you on a sovereign cloud, such as Azure Germany or Azure China? Or, do you use the generally available cloud with a richer feature set? Which region do you want to deploy your resources in: West Europe or Southeast Asia? The following code sample shows how to retrieve available SKUs (Stock keeping units) for different Azure resources.

# For a (at the time of writing buggy) overview of available resources
Get-AzureRmComputeResourceSku

# Filtering for available SKUs
$availableSkus = Get-AzureRmComputeResourceSku |
    Where-Object {$_.Restrictions.ReasonCode -NotContains 'NotAvailableForSubscription'}

Get-AzureRmComputeResourceSku |
    Where-Object {$_.Restrictions.ReasonCode -NotContains 'NotAvailableForSubscription'} |
    Group-Object -Property ResourceType -AsHashTable -AsString

# There are a couple other resource-availability related cmdlets
Get-Command -Noun Azure*Sku

<#
CommandType Name
----------- ----
Cmdlet Get-AzureBatchNodeAgentSku
Cmdlet Get-AzureRmApplicationGatewaySku
Cmdlet Get-AzureRmComputeResourceSku
Cmdlet Get-AzureRmIotHubValidSku
Cmdlet Get-AzureRmVMImageSku
Cmdlet Get-AzureRmVmssSku
Cmdlet New-AzureRmApplicationGatewaySku
Cmdlet Set-AzureRmApplicationGatewaySku
#>

Different regions usually have different resource SKUs available. While one region might already have access to ultra-performance VMs with proper GPUs, another might only have access to lower resource tiers.