Azure Portal - A Beginner's Guide To The Azure Console
By: Archana Choudary
Tags: Azure Portal, Cloud Computing, Azure, Azure Functions, Azure Services

Azure Portal — Edureka

Microsoft Azure which holds the second-highest market share in the Cloud Computing domain is threatening to grab top honors in the near future. The credit for this success also goes to the ease with which Microsoft Azure can be accessed to carry out computing. In this article, we will be exploring how Azure Portal makes it easy to bring all services under one umbrella.

Here is a sneak peek into the pointers this article focuses on:

What Is Microsoft Azure? What Is Azure Portal? Features Of Azure Portal Demo: Exploring Azure Portal

Let us start with a quick introduction to Microsoft Azure first.

Microsoft Azure

This is what Microsoft has to say ‘Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help your organization meet your business challenges. It is the freedom to build, manage and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.‘

Some of the popular service domains it provides are:

Compute

Storage

Database

Networking

Monitoring

Analytics

Migration, etc

Now that we have some idea about what Azure is, let us continue and understand the next point of discussion,

What Is Azure Portal?

Azure Portal as the name suggests is a single portal or a single junction that lets you access and manage all your applications at one place. It lets you build, manage and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud applications in a single, unified console.

Features Of Azure Portal

Below are some of the features of functionalities offered by Azure Portal:

Single Point Management

It is a single point hub that lets you access services like compute, database, storage, web applications, virtual machines etc. Cloud Shell its integrated command interface ensures ease accessing your application through the prompt medium. Also using the Azure Portal ensure high flexibility when it comes to exploring Azure’s graphical capabilities.

Personalized Experience

Having your applications managed to suit your style of work is a great boon for any individual or business. The Azure portal gives Dashboards that allow you to pin your needed applications so that they can be monitored and accessed whenever you wish. This feature ensures your ever adapting needs are met and dealt with properly

Access Control And Security

Security is a top-notch priority when it comes to Cloud Computing. Azure Portal contributes to this cause by ensuring complete control over who gets to access what services. This is achieved by granting Role-Based access controls and subscription at individual and group level.

Service Amalgamation For Powerful Experience

Microsoft Azure offers you thousands of services both open source and the ones that belong to Microsoft stack of software. Now that Azure has made it easier to integrate with all these services, one can combine these to produce a great unified effect and the number of permutations are huge. Hence I will let you do the permutations here. Talking of amalgamating these services you can ensure faster processing more reliability and better Security.

More Visibility

One of the best features of Microsoft Azure is it lets you track both current and projected costs. Now, how does Azure Portal help here? One, it calculates your existing charges automatically. Next, it helps you to forecast your probable monthly expenditure.

All the above is possible irrespective of the number of resources across several apps that are under consideration for management. Azure Portal also makes it, easier track and monitor your cross-cloud analytics and real-time active usage data.

By now we have explored most of the details about Azure Portal but from the theory perspective let us take a step ahead and try and explore the actual portal.

Demo: Exploring Azure Portal

Step1:

First things first, one needs a free tier account or a paid account with Azure. All one needs to do is go to the link ‘portal.azure.com‘. Put in your details. And Azure offers you free services or credits that can be used for a one-month duration. Note you will be expected to enter your credit or debit card details. But stay assured Azure won't charge you without your consent.

Step2:

Once you have an account you can log in and you will be directed to the portal in the image below:

In the image above, the left portion gives you one-click access to all the service domains. Next to it in blue color is the dashboard which is empty by default if any applications are up and running those can be pinned to it. And on top of it is the search bar where you can search for services and resources that don’t feature on the screen.

Step 3:

If you click on the create a new tab you can go ahead and create apps, mobile apps, chatbots, virtual machines etc.

Step 4:

If you take a look at the top left corner. You would find the following tabs. First is the Cloud Shell which is a command line interface which lets you process your data using the command prompt. Second is Notifications tab where all the notifications of your recent activities will be highlighted. Third Tab lets you explore portal settings whereas the fourth tab lets you look for help support provided by Azure.

So this brings us to the end of this article. I hope you enjoyed this article. If you wish to check out more articles on the market’s most trending technologies like Python, DevOps, Ethical Hacking, then you can refer to Edureka’s official site.

Do look out for other articles in this series which will explain the various other aspects of Azure.