Best approach to creating an Azure development environment from an Azure production environment?

Hello,

I have a meager Azure skill set, but it has been enough to build out and manage a small network of production VMs. We have a production environment in Azure for the sole purpose of data aggregation. We have multiple data points outside of our network that we will be pulling into our Azure environment which can then in return be resolved to reports as we see fit. So far, it is working at a basic level. Our environment currently includes 4 production servers.


We will be adding a lot more data points soon, and to avoid potential issues with data loss, or data corruption, we would like to implement a  mirrored copy of our Azure environment for dev and testing purposes.

Although I've never created a dev environment within Azure before, how should I approach and plan for creating a dev environment that mirrors our production environment? This is where my skill level comes to a halt, unfortunately.