Within Azure, I am trying to create a close replica of our production environment for QA purposes. I would like a very close match in terms of overall setup but not horsepower, and I would like to keep costs to a minimum. On to specifics: I would like to set up multiple groups of virtuals to mirror what we have now: one set of virtuals for multiple web services, and one set of virtuals for a front-end website. Each of these virtual sets will have multiple sites/services.
I'd like to use something like an Azure Scale Set in order to keep performance high while keeping costs down, but all the advice and documentation I have found so far seems to expect only a single site/service to be hosted on a scale set. Nothing I have found details how to keep multiple sites/services updated across a scale set.
Alternatively I could just create multiple VM's within each grouping and setup an availability group for each group of servers, but I expect that would mean a fixed cost for each VM in the group whether it's getting used at any given point in time or not. In other words, I would lose the cost saving of a Scale Set in return for easy updates of the multiple sites/services on each virtual.
This is all Windows virtuals with IIS as the host of the sites/services. Note that we do use Azure DevOps to host our source control, so we could setup automated build/deploy processes within if that is an option.
Thank you for your assistance.