Azure Government provides a dedicated cloud with world-class security and compliance,
enabling government agencies and their partners to securely innovate
and transform mission-critical workloads to the cloud.
To manage your cloud environment, workloads, and applications,
you can connect to the Azure Government portal in a variety of ways.
These include using a web-based management portal, PowerShell, or a command-line interface.
The Azure portal is the primary way most people will connect to their Azure Government environment.
To begin, simply connect to the portal at https://portal.azure.us.
From there, we'll provide our Login ID for authentication.
This ID is unique for Azure Government, ensuring safe and secure access.
Next, we'll be prompted for our password.
Now, we'll just click to sign in.
The Azure management portal for government cloud provides a similar
user experience as Azure for commercial customers.
This portal is specifically dedicated to government agencies and their partners.
To get started, we'll check the Service view
and take a look at Azure Government regions and their health status.
Currently, you can choose from 6 available government-only datacenter regions,
including two regions granted a Department of Defense Impact Level 5 Provisional Authorization.
These regions are dedicated to the US Department of Defense
for workload and application deployment.
Two recently announced Azure Secret regions are coming soon.
Azure Government provides more than 50 primary cloud services to meet your different agency requirements.
This means you have one source for comprehensive services:
compute,
storage,
networking,
application,
database,
data analytics,
security,
identity,
IoT,
and AI.
Azure Government ensures you can run your critical workloads and applications on a dedicated portal,
while accessing all the services you'd expect from a leading cloud provider.
Now let's look at other ways we can access Azure services, in addition to the Azure portal.
In our next example, we'll see how to transfer storage from on-premises
to our Azure Government environment, and how to manage the cloud storage we have.
Azure Storage Explorer is a cross-platform tool for working with Azure Storage.
Government customers can now take advantage of all the latest features of
Azure Storage Explorer to connect with Azure Government,
including the ability to create and manage blobs, queues, tables, and file shares.
Connecting to Azure Government is as easy as connecting to a commercial region.
There's no difference other than the endpoint you choose.
We'll simply click on the dropdown and choose Azure US Government.
As this is an external tool accessing our Azure environment,
we must ensure our identity remains secure.
To do that, we’ll add our user name.
And our password.
Now we’re fully connected and can manage our Azure Government storage.
Let’s look at some of our blob storage.
With Storage Explorer, you can view, delete, and copy blobs and folders.
From the same console, you can upload and download blobs while maintaining data integrity.
Storage Explorer also allows you to manage your blob snapshots.
Let’s explore another way to manage cloud resources—the Azure command-line interface.
The CLI enables users to interact with Azure through Command Prompt,
PowerShell, and other mechanisms.
This powerful tool enables efficient management, scripting, and automation capabilities.
Let’s start with Command Prompt.
We’ve installed the Azure CLI on our local machine,
which is no different from the one we’d use to access Azure commercial regions.
To begin, we need to set the active cloud location,
which is the destination we want to connect to.
Like the Azure CLI, the command is no different from how we’d connect to any Azure region.
In this instance we’re just setting our endpoint to Azure US Government.
Okay. So, we’re now successfully connected to the Azure Government endpoint.
But before we can interact with the subscription, just like the portal and Storage Explorer,
we need to authenticate to ensure security and protection.
To do this, we simply use the command az login.
This provides the details of how to log in with the respective URL and authentication code.
Note the URL here is pointing specifically to US Government.
We simply enter that URL into our browser.
Then, we provide the authentication code we were given by the CLI.
This code ensures the source machine has been verified to enable the connection.
To further ensure security, we need to authenticate with our Azure Government account.
Once we have been successfully authenticated, we can return to the Command Prompt interface.
Now that we’re logged in, we can see specific details like cloud name,
user name, user type, and so on
- any command we could use for Azure commercial regions,
we can also use with Azure Government.
There’s no difference.
For example, we can list all the regions we have access to with the simple az cloud list command.
As you can see, the dashboard provides a complete list of our available Azure regions for Government Cloud.
And that’s a wrap!
In this demo, we learned how to access the dedicated Azure Government portal
and discovered that it’s no different from accessing Azure commercial regions.
With a dedicated portal URL and unique credentials,
you can continue to use all the same tools for cloud access, management, and development.
Learn more on azure.com/gov