What is Azure? In short, it’s Microsoft’s cloud platform: a growing collection of integrated services—compute, storage, data, networking, and app—that help you move faster, do more, and save money. But that’s just scratching the surface. Here’s what else Azure is…. Visit Microsoft Azure to learn more.
Azure is the only major cloud platform ranked by Gartner as an industry leader for both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). This powerful combination of managed and unmanaged services lets you build, deploy, and manage applications any way you like for unmatched productivity.
Some cloud providers make you choose between your datacenter and the public cloud. Not Azure. Its enterprise-proven hybrid cloud solutions give you the best of both worlds, expanding your IT options without added complexity. With Azure, data storage, backup, and recovery become more efficient and economical. It’s also easier to build applications that span both on-premises and the cloud.
Azure supports any operating system, language, tool, and framework— from Windows to Linux, SQL Server to Oracle, C# to Java. It puts the best of Windows and Linux ecosystems at your fingertips, so you can build great applications and services that work with every device.
Specially with open source software, Microsoft has the most open source contributors on GitHub, with projects like .Net or Visual Studio Code. For example, PowerShell recently made its debut on macOS and Linux. Also, the Microsoft Edge’s JavaScript engine, ChakraCore arrived to macOS and Linux users. The reaction has been surprisingly good in the community, as Google joined .Net Foundation. Take a look at some of the open source efforts on Azure: Open Source on Azure.
You’ll share the same enterprise-tested platform that powers Skype, Office 365, Bing, and Xbox. Azure offers a 99.95% availability SLA, 24x7 tech support, and round-the-clock service health monitoring. That’s why more than 85% of Fortune 500 use Azure over 30 unique Azure regions. From live streaming Olympic events to online multiplayer online games, our customers are doing some amazing things.
Azure can quickly scale up or down to match demand, so you only pay for what you use. Per-minute billing and a commitment to match competitor prices for popular infrastructure services like compute, storage and bandwidth means you’re always getting unbeatable price for performance
Azure runs on a growing global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters across <30></30> regions, giving you a wide range of options for running applications and ensuring your customers always get great performance. Azure is the first multinational cloud provider in mainland China and is continuing to expand to new regions around the globe.
To work with Microsoft cloud platform - Microsoft Azure, the main portal is accessible in https://portal.azure.com. This is provides you an all-in-one, work-anywhere experience for you tom manage all of your applications—including web apps, databases, virtual machines, virtual networks, storage, and Visual Studio team projects.
This unified hub radically simplifies building, deploying, and managing your cloud resources. Imagine a single easy-to-use console built just for you, your team, and your projects. Make it your own best-in-class toolset by adding fully integrated capabilities from Microsoft, partners, and the open source community. Organize your portal to custom-fit your work and your work style. Stay on top of the things that matter most by pinning them to your Startboard. Resize tiles to show just the right amount of detail and get insights across apps and resources.
For Enterprises, the Role-based Access Control gives you precise control over who can manage what. Grant explicit management and access rights to the subscription, service, and operation levels for individuals and groups.
The Azure Portal will help you combine services to create powerful applications bringing an outcome-driven and technology-agnostic approach. Pick from more than 3,000 services from both Microsoft and partners, many of them free. You’ll find open-source applications, frameworks, and templates, as well as single and multiple virtual machine images. And when you combine these with Azure services, you can create powerful solutions for any device, any cloud.
Azure offers pay-as-you-go services. We'll help you forecast costs at a glance while showing you all service usage in a combined single bill. The Azure portal automatically calculates your existing charges and forecasts your likely monthly charges, even if you’re managing hundreds of resources across a few apps. Plus, it’s simple to drill into your cross-cloud analytics and real-time active use data when you enable monitoring and diagnostics and monitor service metrics.
Finally, if you need an integrated support experience with alert notifications and help quickly. Microsoft provides the full range of resources to help you get started and grow, from access to our communities and forums, specific troubleshooting information, or direct support from a world-class Azure Support representative — plus a direct feedback channel to the Azure product team.
As the name suggests this is a portal to manage Azure services, which was released back in 2012. It's still available in https://manage.windowsazure.com, and some operations (fewer every day) may require you to use this management portal.
All operations done in Azure, can be programmatically executed. Microsoft Azure exposes a set of REST APIs, that are fundamental to the cloud operation. Even Windows Azure Portal, relies in this Azure APIs. Like so, Microsoft made available the Azure Powershell cmdlets. These are a set of modules that provide cmdlets to manage Azure with Windows PowerShell. You can use the cmdlets to create, test, deploy, and manage solutions and services delivered through the Azure platform. In most cases, the cmdlets can be used for the same tasks as the Azure Portal, such as creating and configuring cloud services, virtual machines, virtual networks, and web apps.
Azure PowerShell cmdlets provide support for the following Azure services:
- Azure Resource Manager: Enables you to work with the resources in your solution as a group. You can deploy, update, or delete all the resources for your solution in a single, coordinated operation.
- Azure Service Management : helps you manage your deployments, hosted services, and storage accounts.
- Azure Storage: is the cloud storage solution for modern applications that rely on durability, availability, and scalability to meet your needs. Storage supports Blob storage, File storage, Queue storage, and Table storage.
For more information, and how to install and use it, read here.
If your Operating System is not Windows, then you may want to use Azure Command-Line Interface (Azure CLI). It's a set of open-source shell-based commands for creating and managing resources in Microsoft Azure. You may run it in you Linux or macOS machine. To install you can follow several options:
- npm package - Run npm (the package manager for JavaScript) to install the latest Azure CLI package on your Linux distribution or OS. Requires node.js and npm on your computer.
- Installer - Download an installer for easy installation on Mac or Windows.
- Docker container - Start using the latest CLI in a ready-to-run Docker container. Requires Docker host on your computer.
Once the Azure CLI is installed, connect it with your Azure subscription and run the azure commands from your command-line interface (Bash, Terminal, Command prompt, and so on) to work with your Azure resources.