What's the most efficient and modern toolchain for deploying a whole network of VM's and then configuring them on Azure?
We are trying to automate our deployment of about 14 VM's on 4 subnets with a Load Balancer to the Azure cloud. Currently we're using Azure Powershell and the JSON Templates to accomplish the provisioning, after which we'll have to also choose a tool for deploying our code to those machines and configuring them (I've read of Chef and Puppet but we'd like to do this as simply as possible).
With Powershell and Templates, provisioning takes about 25 minutes and sometimes times out while provisioning the Redis VM. Is there a way to have the Powershell script execute almost immediately, but just uploading the JSON Template to Azure, and have Azure do all of the REST API work to direct the provisioning?