We've been looking at Azure and other services like Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk and truly the one thing that would make it all easier to explore is a solid guide for common software.

Great, I've got an instance running! How do I handle DB setup? What about app/media storage? How do we add SSL?

You can generally work your way through adding the necessary systems to the stack and gluing things together but an official guide or two would be invaluable and give me the feeling that I'm doing things The Right Way.