The Azure Portal

I want to quickly introduce the Azure portal. I’m not going to cover it in great detail, for a number of reasons:

• It frequently evolves. (It may have changed as I type this sentence.)
• It is highly intuitive. The best way to learn it is to actually navigate to it and look around all the different areas.
• Microsoft has its own help for the portal, including a nice walkthrough.
• Most importantly, you won’t use it in production.

That last item might seem odd, and I may be exaggerating, a little. To be more precise, I should say that you wouldn’t use it to create resources. The Azure portal is great. As you are learning, it is nice to use it because of its intuitiveness; it makes it easy to see what is available and what the options are. It’s easy to see current state and to interact with components such as logging and monitoring—but not for resource creation.

You can create a VM through the portal with about 10 clicks and by typing a few...