James Serra gives an introductory walkthrough to Cortana Intelligence Solutions:
Cortana Intelligence Solutions is a new tool just released in public preview that enables users to rapidly discover, easily provision, quickly experiment with, and jumpstart production grade analytical solutions using the Cortana Intelligence Suite (CIS). It does so using preconfigured solutions, reference architectures and design patterns (I’ll just call all these solutions “patterns” for short). At the heart of each Cortana Intelligence Solution pattern is one or more ARM Templates which describe the Azure resources to be provisioned in the user’s Azure subscription. Cortana Intelligence Solution patterns can be complex with multiple ARM templates, interspersed with custom tasks (Web Jobs) and/or manual steps (such as Power BI authorization in Stream Analytics job outputs).
So instead of having to manually go to the Azure web portal and provision many sources, these patterns will do it for you automatically. Think of a pattern as a way to accelerate the process of building an end-to-end demo on top of CIS. A deployed solution will provision your subscription with necessary CIS components (i.e. Event Hub, Stream Analytics, HDInsight, Data Factory, Machine Learning, etc.) and build the relationships between them.
James also walks through an entire solution, so check it out.