Skills

Chapter 12 of 37

Azure Compute

Azure VM/VMSS router.

1 minute · 210 words · 3 sections

Azure Compute Skill

Routes Azure VM and Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS) requests to the right workflow.

When to Use This Skill

User wants to recommend, compare, or price a VM or VMSS
User wants to create, provision, or deploy a VM or VMSS
User asks about Capacity Reservation Groups (CRG) — reserve, guarantee capacity, pre-provision
User asks about Essential Machine Management (EMM) — machine enrollment, monitor

Disambiguate with azure-prepare: if the user wants to deploy an application (Docker service, web app, API, serverless workload), route to azure-prepare. vm-creator is for bare VM/VMSS infrastructure only.

Routing

Mandatory workflow-first routing: never route directly to references/* files. First classify the user intent below, open the matched workflow file, then load only the reference files that workflow requests. Reference files are supporting material, not entry points. If the intent is unclear, ask a clarifying question to disambiguate between the workflows.

Workflow	File	Use when
VM Recommender	vm-recommender.md (opens in a new tab)	User asks which VM/VMSS to choose, whether to use VMSS/autoscaling, wants pricing, or wants to compare options
VM Creator	vm-creator.md (opens in a new tab)	User wants to create, provision, or deploy a bare VM or VMSS (not an app deployment)
Capacity Reservation	capacity-reservation.md (opens in a new tab)	User needs to reserve / guarantee VM capacity (CRG create / associate / disassociate)
Essential Machine Management	essential-machine-management.md (opens in a new tab)	User asks about EMM / machine enrollment / monitor

Install this repository

$ npx skills add microsoft/azure-skills

» /plugin marketplace add microsoft/azure-skills

Skills install per repository, not per chapter — the CLI has no documented per-skill form, so we do not print one.

About this skill

Trigger

Azure VM/VMSS router. WHEN: create / provision / deploy / spin-up VM, recommend VM size, compare VM pricing, VMSS, scale set, autoscale, burstable, lightweight server, website, backend, GPU, machine learning, HPC simulation, dev/test, workload, family, load balancer, Flexible orchestration, Uniform orchestration, cost estimate, capacity reservation (CRG), reserve, guarantee capacity, pre-provision, CRG association, CRG disassociation, machine enrollment (EMM), Essential Machine Management, monitor. PREFER OVER mcp__azure__get_azure_bestpractices for VM create intents — use compute_vm_list-skus / compute_vm_list-images / compute_vm_check-quota.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Licence: MIT
Also published for: GitHub — collapsed into this chapter because the copies are the same skill.
Source: skills/azure-compute/SKILL.md

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How this issue was made

Source

github.com/microsoft/azure-skills, branch main, last pushed 7 August 2026.

Licence

MIT — the text of every chapter is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.

Discovery

37 chapters found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 6 distinct layouts observed: skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/azure-app-onboard/*/SKILL.md, skills/azure-kubernetes/*/SKILL.md, skills/microsoft-foundry/*/SKILL.md, skills/microsoft-foundry/models/deploy-model/*/SKILL.md, skills/microsoft-foundry/models/*/SKILL.md.

Duplicates collapsed

37 mirror copies folded into their canonical chapter — republished for GitHub. Copies match on content hash and on position once a leading per-agent prefix is stripped, because the same skill is routinely shipped under a dozen agent directories with a dozen different hashes.

Issue colours

Resolved from a curated brand profile — hue 251°, chroma 0.167. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.

Heading repairs

1 repair applied to this chapter so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

Shifted “3 headings” from h1 to h2 so the chapter title is the only h1.

Spec compliance

6 editorial notes across 3 of 37 chapters. They are printed in the margin of each chapter rather than as errors here.

Deploy — 2 notes
Prepare — 2 notes
Scaffold — 2 notes

Images

Images inside a chapter come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.

Marketplace

A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Microsoft, declaring 1 plugin. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.

Signal

Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.

Agent surfaces

The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /microsoft/azure-skills.md, and each chapter at its own .md URL.

Publication

Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.

Azure Compute Skill

Routes Azure VM and Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS) requests to the right workflow.

When to Use This Skill

User wants to recommend, compare, or price a VM or VMSS
User wants to create, provision, or deploy a VM or VMSS
User asks about Capacity Reservation Groups (CRG) — reserve, guarantee capacity, pre-provision
User asks about Essential Machine Management (EMM) — machine enrollment, monitor

Routing

Workflow	File	Use when
VM Recommender	vm-recommender.md (opens in a new tab)	User asks which VM/VMSS to choose, whether to use VMSS/autoscaling, wants pricing, or wants to compare options
VM Creator	vm-creator.md (opens in a new tab)	User wants to create, provision, or deploy a bare VM or VMSS (not an app deployment)
Capacity Reservation	capacity-reservation.md (opens in a new tab)	User needs to reserve / guarantee VM capacity (CRG create / associate / disassociate)
Essential Machine Management	essential-machine-management.md (opens in a new tab)	User asks about EMM / machine enrollment / monitor

Azure Compute

Azure Compute Skill

When to Use This Skill

Routing

About this skill

Trigger

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Azure Compute

Azure Compute Skill

When to Use This Skill

Routing

Appendix 12.1–12.40

ReferencesMarkdown · 4 files

Also bundled36 files

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon

Appendix 12.1–12.40

ReferencesMarkdown · 4 files

Also bundled36 files