One VM, clicked through the portal
Three ways manual deploy fails as the team grows
1. Drift
Notes / wiki said
VM size
Standard_B2s
on-call resized by hand
Live Azure now has
VM size
Standard_D4s_v5
2. No reproducibility
Prod VM (portal clicks)
prod-api-vm
B2s · West Europe · NSG: ?
"same for staging"
Staging VM (more clicks)
stg-api-vm
B1s · North Europe · NSG: different
3. Onboarding friction
New engineer asks
"How is this VM deployed?"
honest answer
Tribal checklist
1. Open portal...
2. Click Create VM...
3. ~38 more steps...
IaC replaces all three with one file you deploy the same way every time.