Technical requirements

You won't need any additional software for most of this first chapter, as we will be focusing on attaining a high-level understanding of the Azure infrastructure. Having Azure portal access to an existing subscription is certainly handy for following along, but not needed for understanding the concepts.

At the end of the chapter, we will review the multiple methods for accessing the Azure management interfaces. So, if you do have access to an existing Azure environment, the following tools will be helpful to have available:

• The Azure command-line interface (CLI)
• The Az PowerShell module
• The Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) PowerShell module

If you don't have access to an existing Azure environment, don't worry. We will go through the steps to creating your own testing environment in Chapter 2, Building Your Own Environment.