Trying to figure out Azure?
Not sure where to go?
Don't know where to begin?
Well, the Azure Portal is going to have all the answers you need.
I'm going to show you how to get into it
and how to use it to your advantage.
All that and more coming up now.
Hello everybody, welcome back.
We're continuing our conversations
in the ‘What Is Azure?’ series.
I'm Adam Gordon, an edutainer here at ITProTV,
coming at you with another fun-filled episode
about all the things you need to know regarding,
‘What is Azure?’,
‘How you can use it?’ and of course,
‘Why it's so important for you and your business?’
In this episode, we're going to tackle something
we probably should have done right at the beginning
as we started this series, which is,
‘What the heck is the Azure Portal?’
and, ‘Why is it so important to you?’
And of course, when we talk about those questions,
we always have three questions we answer in this series.
What is it? Why is it important?
And the most important one for you, more often than not,
how do you actually use the feature, the service,
or the product that we're highlighting?
Now, I get asked a lot about,
‘What is the Azure Portal
and how can I actually go ahead and make use of it?’
We're going to answer those questions for you with no trouble.
But let's step back, literally and figuratively,
because this episode is a little bit different
than all the others in the series.
Normally, you see me starting on our conversations
at the lightboard.
We spend a lot of time showing you some sort of a picture
that represents the service, the feature, the capability.
We talk about it and then put it into context,
and then we actually transport ourselves magically here
into one of our studios in ITProTV
and we actually address the last of those three questions.
How do we actually do this thing?
For this episode, there's really nothing I can put
on the lightboard except draw a picture of something
that I can show you directly.
And so what we're going to do
is actually just spend our time here.
I want to talk a little bit about what the Azure Portal is
and why it's so important to you
to answer those first two questions.
But then we're going to spend the majority of our time
actually looking at different ways you can access the portal
using a variety of technologies and platforms,
some of which you may not actually be aware
of that you have access to.
It's actually a pretty interesting capability
and it gives us the flexibility that we as IT administrators,
and you as users of the Azure services, are actually looking for.
Microsoft's done a really good job
of making this as available as possible.
So let's begin by talking about what the Azure Portal is.
When we think about using Azure,
we're talking about using cloud services, whatever they may be,
that are provided through the Azure service fabric.
The capabilities that Microsoft provides
to customers that consume
and are ultimately going to be using those Azure services vary.
I've talked a lot about many of them
in other areas of this series
and I encourage you to watch one or more of those episodes
to really get a handle on the depth,
the breadth, and the full capabilities
that Microsoft Azure can provide to you.
But generically, at its core, it is a service solution
that provides infrastructure, platform, and software
as a service capabilities for us as IT professionals to manage,
taking our racked and stacked infrastructure
that often exists in our on-premises environments,
and perhaps through hybrid capabilities,
linking it to the cloud
and using the Azure Portal to then visualize, interact with,
manage, and ultimately optimize those offerings.
It may be that we're going to go all-in in the cloud
and take whatever we have going on back here
and magically make it disappear and reappear in the cloud,
getting out of the "we own it and we want to manage it"
business on-premises
and transfer all those capabilities into the cloud.
We could do that as well with Azure.
We also can have a hybrid solution
that allows us to do both, as I suggested.
And whether we're just on-premises,
managing our own infrastructure
but maybe interacting with other cloud services through Azure
because we're a partner of a business that uses it.
Maybe we're managing and co-managing our own
in a hybrid scenario or all-in in the cloud.
The Azure Portal is the gateway to all those services
and all those capabilities.
So we could check off the answer to the what question.
Let's talk a little bit about why the Azure Portal
is so important for you as an IT administrator,
an IT professional, and you as a business owner,
whoever you may be as you're watching the series
and thinking about the ways that Azure,
most likely, will be able to add value to you
and your organization,
the ways in which you're going to interact with it
to extract and ultimately manage that value.
You've got to have a central solution, easily accessible,
and of course, relatively straightforward and simple to use.
And the Azure Portal fits all of those criteria.
It is the gateway that Microsoft provides
through a graphical user interface.
The G-U-I or GUI as you often hear people refer to it
as is a very common capability that we've all come to know
and use in the modern technology-driven environments
that we operate in today.
Most systems have some sort of graphical front end
you can interact with and/or a command line,
or it can type things in and see things happen.
And the Azure Portal represents the ability
to have both of those
using a graphical web-services-driven UI, User Interface.
We have the most modern up-to-date capabilities
that businesses and IT administrators
and professionals that support them require to do
the daily business of using the consuming services in Azure.
And we have command-line interfaces for more advanced
and specific operations, some of which, at scale
may need to automate perhaps hundreds
or thousands of tasks occurring across the environment.
And that environment may be local to one geography,
it could be global spanning today.
And so we have the best of those capabilities
brought together in one place
as we think about using the Azure Portal.
And so the reason why it's so important to you
and your business is it provides you all the capabilities,
the tools, the resources,
and of course, the visibility you need
in order to access and manage all of the Azure real estate
and all the things you're doing in Azure.
So we can say hopefully,
that the answer to the why question is good.
We'll put a check next to that one as well.
Let's move on to my favorite part of our conversations,
which is the how.
We get to roll up our sleeves here, proverbially,
and in this case, literally.
We get to take a look at how we can access the portal.
Now, I mentioned that there are multiple ways
to be able to do this, some that you're probably familiar with.
If you're using Azure, you're certainly accessing the portal,
most likely using a web browser,
perhaps Microsoft Edge, perhaps Google Chrome.
And I'll show you that we can do that
with both of those with no trouble.
But you may or may not be aware of the fact
there are at least two other methods that can be used
to access the Azure Portal, one or both of which may prove
to be equally valuable and equally time-saving for you.
So join me here, if you will.
Let's take a look at my desktop.
I've got a Windows 10 machine that I'm running,
probably very similar to what many of you are going to be using
to access the Azure Portal.
And we'll start with the web capabilities.
I mentioned we could use more than one web browser.
We officially are able to use Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.
We can use the Safari browser most likely as well.
Usually, the latest version of those browsers
is what is currently supported,
based on Microsoft's own documentation.
So if you have an older version
and it doesn't work quite the right way,
or perhaps you're not as comfortable with it
and some things are not working, try updating the browser.
Usually, that solves most of the problems.
But the big three are typically supported with no trouble.
Again, there may be other browsers that will work.
I've used the Brave browser, for instance,
to access the Azure Portal.
It works. But some of the capabilities are not available
because Brave tends to lock down a lot of the capabilities
in the browser through pop-ups and additional capabilities
that are blocked natively because of the security settings.
And it may or may not be a good solution for you.
Firefox, another browser that will typically work
and usually not have any issues
if you want to access the portal.
So you tend to have at least three or four web browser options.
So I'm going to start by showing you
the Microsoft Edge experience
and we'll reproduce that in Google Chrome.
Now you do have to have an Azure tenant setup.
You do have to have an administrative logon,
a username, and a password.
And that may involve multi-factor authentication
if you've enabled that.
So you may have to have not only the username
and the password,
but you may then have to have an authenticator app
and some sort of challenge code or one-time password or PIN
that you may have to use to log in.
There's a variety of ways you can do that.
We're not going to get into the specifics
of how to set all that up in this episode,
but certainly, you can join me over at ITProTV
where I do talk about how to administer, set up, and manage
Azure infrastructure at scale in a variety of our offerings.
You can always learn more about
all the things we do both in these episodes in the series
and across the depth and breadth
of most of the product lines you work with and you manage
by hanging out with me and all my colleagues,
the entertainers that I work with every day, over an ITProTV.
So keep that in mind if you want a little more detail.
We're going to jump into Microsoft Azure
by opening the Edge browser.
I've already got it open.
I've already logged in to the portal.
And it's really straightforward.
All we need to do,
let's just zoom in up here so you can see this,
is point our web browser at portal.azure.com.
Very simple URL.
It's right there in the address bar.
And that's going to then be resolved to a front end
where we have to provide our credentials, as I just mentioned.
And assuming we provide the right one, we log in,
we get to a portal front end, a web page that looks like this.
This is the home landing page as you can see here, right?
This is the dashboard.
It just depends on where you want to begin
and where you want to start.
I'm logged in as my o365gGuy alias,
so that's me right over there in the corner.
And I've got dark mode turned on in the browser for the portal
so it appears a lot darker and the background stands out.
Or rather, the background makes the foreground stand out
when I'm presenting and doing things.
By default, it will look a lot lighter.
You'll have a white background,
everything will be nice and crisp and bright.
So it's really a question of how you choose to configure
and set those things up,
in case it doesn't look like this when you log in.
But from here I can use the navigation bar over here,
the shortcut area on the left, which I can, by the way,
customize and add or remove things too if I want to.
And I can find, you know, the top 10, or maybe 15,
area services functions that I'm typically using.
Things like, as you can see here as we zoom in, virtual machines.
I can find load balancer storage accounts.
And we have these nice little pop-out cards
that show up as we hover.
And we can access some common functionality
like creating right from here, reviewing,
perhaps looking at a very recently used virtual machine.
And I can find information from Microsoft
that they may be sending out
and making available as part of that as well.
So I could do all of that.
If I go to the Home blade, I can look for resources,
I can create them, I can see a list of things I've used recently
under Services and Recent Resources down below.
And I can begin the process of interacting with
and creating the opportunity to consume services
and functionality right from here.
And/or I can search for any and all service offerings
by going to the all services area,
essentially what we call the Marketplace.
And by doing this, I can come in
and I have a categorical driven search area
that lines up all the different offerings for me.
I can search and I can find something.
And as you've seen in other episodes in the series,
I can then spin up that particular resource,
whether it's a virtual machine, the media services,
and Azure Kubernetes service cluster,
or anything that I may want to use,
and depending on the complexity of that environment,
I'll go through the configuration,
and eventually, I'll be able to manage that with no trouble.
So this is what it looks like
if we sign in using Microsoft's Edge browser.
Now, if I want to do the same thing with another web browser,
I can open up Google Chrome.
And I've signed in already with Google Chrome as well.
Again, you'll see the URL looks the same, portal.azure.com.
Same experience. I've got dark mode on
so it transfers between the web browsers with no trouble.
And the layout and the look in the feel
is basically going to be identical.
There's really no difference here.
I'm logged in, as you can see,
as my o365guy alias off to the right,
and I have the same level of capabilities.
If I go to the Home blade,
I can find and use recently searched for
and/or consumed resources, spin up new instances,
I can customize and work with areas off the dashboard,
and I can go to the Marketplace
and use the categorical search
to find resources, create, deploy, and consume them.
So this is what it looks like if we log in through web browsers.
And to be fair, most people consume Azure Portal services
by using a web browser to do so.
But I promise you
there's at least two other ways you can do this
you may or may not be familiar with.
One of them is a desktop app
that is available that you can install on,
let's say, a Windows 10 machine, as I've done.
And you can log into the portal
and have the same experience but it's not a web browser.
Instead, it's an actual application that's running.
Now you can simply search on Google
for Microsoft Azure Portal application
to find the download link
for the software I'm about to show you.
I've installed it, and it puts a little shortcut,
once it is installed, right up here.
Whoops, let's try that one more time.
In our recently added area right there,
you could see it right up there at the top.
It's got the little Azure icon and it's installed there.
It creates a folder alphabetically
in the A area under the Azure Portal.
And I can just go in and launch it right from there.
Now I've already done that.
So it's opened up right here.
First time we log in, we have to provide the same credential.
it looks and feels
just like the web capabilities we get from a browser.
The only difference is I'm using a desktop application.
But I can go into the Home blade,
I can find previously used services
and create new iterations of them or consume them.
I can go to the dashboard.
Same exact look and feel.
I'm still logged in as o365guy right up there.
And I have the ability to go to the Marketplace
with all services and categorically search
and deploy new instances as well.
So this application is available.
It's been available for some time by the way.
This is not new.
It's been out for a couple years now.
But if you're not familiar with it,
you can easily download it and install it.
Now, I've got one more that I want to show you.
This is actually really cool.
We can also do this from mobile devices like perhaps,
for instance, an "I" device, an iPhone.
Or for that matter, I could do it from an Android device as well.
So I run this app that I'm about to show you all the time
on my Android smartphone.
We're going to demonstrate it for you on an iPhone
just so you can see what it looks like.
So we're currently logged in to that same Azure experience,
that same management portal experience
I just showed you in the web browser
I just showed you in the desktop app.
But we've done this as an app on,
in this case, the iPhone device.
Went to the iTunes Store,
downloaded the Azure application, installed it.
Again, we could do the same thing on the Android platform.
I've gone ahead and just logged in for the first time,
provided my credentials, and I'm in.
Now, big disclaimer here, this app is limited in its capabilities.
So it's not going to give you the same capabilities necessarily
that we have with the other apps.
We have most of those capabilities, as you can see.
At the bottom, you can see we are on the home screen.
I can toggle, I can look at subscriptions.
There's my subscription right there.
I can toggle again, I can go to Resources
and see all the resources that are available.
I can search for these categorically as well, by the way.
I can go ahead, I can look at notifications.
Currently, no notifications.
I can even open a Cloud Shell instance
and initialize a command-line shell that's going to allow me,
using either Bash, as you can see, or PowerShell.
I can switch between them with the buttons
at the top of the screen to connect in,
authenticate using my credentials,
and be able to then manage the infrastructure
that I am connected to in my subscription right from here.
I can create new infrastructure. I can deploy it.
I can interact with it. I can configure it.
All of that can be done right from here.
I can also go ahead and just get right out of that.
I can go back here to the home area.
And for instance,
if I want to see the most recent virtual machines
that have been created, I can use that shortcut.
I can go to the virtual machine
that's currently there and is available.
It's currently powered off, as we can see there.
But you'll notice down at the bottom,
I can actually start this VM up right from here.
And when I do that, it'll take a couple of minutes,
we're not going to wait for it to start up,
but you could see it will actually power up.
And when it comes online, I can then interact with it
and manage it right from here if I choose to.
Notice I can stop it, start it, restart it,
and even connect to it using RDP.
And I can then remotely administer that VM
right from within this app
and using a separate window to open that client up
and connect to the Windows desktop and administer it directly.
I use this app all the time
when I'm remotely managing infrastructure
for customers all over the world
to connect to their subscriptions
and interact with their resources.
So it gives me maximum flexibility.
I'm traveling, I'm on a plane,
I'm somewhere where I'm not easily going to be able
to access my laptop, but I have my phone.
I can quickly log into someone's Azure infrastructure,
troubleshoot an issue, take care of a problem,
spin up and create a resource or interact with them
in a support capacity and figure out what's going on.
We like the flexibility.
And we like the fact that we have multiple different ways
of consuming Azure resources through the Azure Portal.
As we do with every episode,
I'm going to wrap up by telling you
that we have opportunities to continue hanging out with you,
as I already suggested, over at ITProTV.
If you want to learn more about Azure,
want to learn more about any of the things that we talk about
and train on every day,
all you have to do is point your web browser over to ITProTV,
take a look at what we have to offer you can hang out with me.
All of our entertainers are going to be equally
as engaging, interesting,
and while they don't have great beards like I do,
but you're going to still love hanging out with us.
We can spend time teaching you and your teams
anything and everything you want to know.
I'm going to say goodbye for now.
Wish you happy Azuring, and I'll see you soon.