Hello there and thank you very much for joining us
today in this new Azure Portal How To video. Today we
learn how to simplify deployments in policy
constrained environments. And we have Adam
Abdelhamed with us, who is going to show us how to do to
that. So, thank you very much for joining us today, Adam.
>> Thank you, Leon. Yes, these constrained environments
can get complex. Azure has hundreds of services that can
each be configured in lots of different ways depending on
your use case. As your organizations mature, you might
decide to limit which services you want to use. You may
decide to limit which geographies
you want to deploy to, or
maybe you have to conform with some security standard
that your industry is regulated by. In any of those cases,
Azure Policy allows you to express those constraints in a
simple and scalable way. I’m going to talk to you today
about how the portal makes it easy to deploy resources
when you’re in these constrained environments.
That sounds awesome. Let’s take a look.
So, here we are in the portal and we’re going to visit
the create a new virtual machine wizard. Now this
subscription that’s been
selected doesn’t actually have any
policies applied to it at the moment, so I’m free to choose
any region and any VM size, which are the two interesting
properties we’ll be talking about today.
So, I’ll go ahead and I’ll select
a non-U.S. region and that’s
no problem. And I’ll go into the size picker and you’ll see
that there’s a pretty large number of groups and each
group has a fair number of sizes that the user can choose
from, and there’s nothing
here that’s limiting my selection.
Now, let’s say we go and
switch to a different subscription
and a different resource group, where I actually have
deployed some policies that are going to limit my options
here. The first thing that takes place is that the region
picker is actually recognized that that non-U.S. region
would not have been compliant, so it automatically
switched it to a compliant region. This is what we want to
be doing throughout the entire portal, making it so that
users don’t even have to think about options. We just
select compliant options by default. When I go down to the
size picker, you’ll notice something else we’ve done.
We’ve done a treatment, where we make it clear that
you’re not actually going to be able to pick from all the
different sizes because
Policy’s in place. And what we’ve
got down here is a message that can actually be
customized by whoever in your organization is assigning
these policies. So, whatever they want it to say will show
up right here. And if I have permission, I could even go
and click and inspect the
policy to learn a little bit more
about what it’s doing. But more importantly, when I go in
to see all of the sizes, many of the groups have been
removed because now there’s no sizes in that group that
are available for me. And all of the sizes that are not
available have been put into this block by policy section,
where I can sort of ignore them. And again, I get that
customer-specific compliance message. And so, this
dramatically simplifies, for the person who’s picking the
size, it simplifies that process because instead of looking
through dozens or many
dozens of sizes, there’s just a few
to pick from.
And so, policy awareness in
the portal is in its early days. I
just showed you two
properties, region and size, where
policy awareness could be helpful. But Policy can target
any property on any resource type. So, you can imagine
that this scenario is going to play out in many of these
forms in many of the pages within the portal.
Over the next few months, we hope to make this the
standard experience in the portal because we know that
fewer options, smarter defaults, and clear messaging has a
dramatic effect on the simplicity of the experience.
>> Thank you very much, Adam. This is awesome.
Please try this out. Let us know what you think in the comments.
We also have dozens of other videos that show how to do
very important tasks in Azure that you can try as well.
So, try them out and let us know what you think as well.
So, thank you very much for watching for now and see
you in the next video. Bye.