Aspiring Azure developers and infrastructure specialists can begin by understanding the fundamentals of virtual machines (VMs), which are pivotal for migrating applications from dedicated hardware, providing full control over software installation, storage, and networking configuration. Azure offers various methods for creating and configuring VMs, including the Azure Portal and Azure CLI, with the process involving selecting an operating system, configuring storage and CPU-memory ratios, and setting up administrator accounts and inbound ports. While creating a single VM can be straightforward using the Azure Portal, managing complex applications with multiple VMs for components like web servers and databases is more efficiently handled through infrastructure as code and cloud engineering methodologies, such as Pulumi's Azure Native provider. This approach allows automation of the build, deployment, and management processes, making them repeatable and reducing errors, thereby providing a scalable solution for provisioning and maintaining cloud infrastructure.