Introduction to the Azure management portal - Azure Tutorial

- [Narrator] So before we dive into the various Azure virtual networking resources and how we configure them, let's talk a little bit about the management tool that we use to manage, create, configure, troubleshoot all of the various Azure virtual networking resources that will exist in my environment. The tool that I use to manage all resources in Azure, including virtual networking, is the Azure portal. So accessible by going to portal.azure.com, I can see here all of the resources and manage them, create them, configure them as I need. This is of course a graphical user interface view of the management tool. There is also a command line version of this tool that is accessible by going to the Cloud Shell. And you can go to the Cloud Shell by clicking on the Cloud Shell link available in the top bar in the portal. When I click on the Cloud Shell link, I have two options available for the Cloud Shell environment. I have Bash. And if you come from a Linux environment, you are familiar with Bash scripting or PowerShell. If you are coming from a Microsoft environment both on-prem or cloud, you're familiar with Microsoft PowerShell, the scripting interface. So if I click on PowerShell, I then have a choice to either select a storage account that exists to actually maintain persistence between my Cloud Shell sessions, or I can say that I don't want to maintain persistence and not use a storage account. So I'm actually going to use a storage account and I'm going to select a subscription that that storage account will be available in. And I'm going to then select the storage account, select the file share. Now I don't have an existing file share, so I'm going to create a file share called cloudshell, and all of my sessions will be stored in this cloudshell file share. Now, just to note, this is a one-time operation that is needed. Once you've done it in your environment, you do not need to do it again. And now that my file share has been created, it's connected to the Cloud Shell and I can start to initiate commands and I can perform various tasks. Anything that I can do in my graphical interface, I can do from my command line interface. And I can also run scripts and I can perform automation from here as well. So it's a very efficient way of managing complex environments when you have various tasks that need to be repeated. And there are various Azure modules and documentation available on how we actually perform tasks within the Cloud Shell. In this course later on, we will perform some tasks in the Cloud Shell because there are some things that you cannot perform from the portal simply because the graphical interface hasn't been programmed. It hasn't been created. So the command exists. The ability to manage a specific setting exists, but it can only be done in command line. So you may use the PowerShell Cloud Shell for either automation or performing repeated tasks, or sometimes to perform advanced management tasks that are not available in the graphical interface. So all objects within the Azure portal have similar type interface where I click on an object and I have a blade on the left and on the right I have a view of all the various settings that exist for an object. So there's similar type of options that you will always see. You will see an overview blade, you will see an activity log, a access control. You will see tags as well as some monitoring. So these are pretty common options for all objects in Azure and all virtual networking objects as well. So when I go into the overview tab, I will be able to review some common information such as the name of the resource group where my object is stored. Objects in Azure are stored or organized in resource groups. Resource groups are organized within a subscription. So I have a subscription here and all of my resources are stored within that subscription, but they are organized within a resource group first. You can segment and use resource groups and permissions to be boundaries, and those boundaries are mostly used for administration for security. So for example, I may have a different administrator for this resource group than the administrator that has access to the entire subscription. Or I may use this resource group to organize all of my virtual networking resources and a separate subscription resource group that will then host other type of resources and then I can delegate permissions accordingly. There are other courses available that discuss the distinction of how to apply permissions and roles across resource groups and subscriptions, but I just want to make sure that these basic concepts are clear as we move forward in the course. If you want to review all of the various permissions that are applied to your resources with an access control, you're able to review those permissions and even grant additional permissions if you have yourself the permission to grant. As well, I have a tags option that is available in all resources in Azure. This is where you can tag your resources using key pair values to later on be able to find them easier. So it's sort of like applying a little bit of metadata to your resource so that later on you can search for those resources and find them easily. As well, I have here monitoring, which allows you to specify various alerts and diagnostic logging to review what's happening to your resources. So again, these types of properties are available with most of the resources within Azure. All of the virtual resources that we're going to create within Azure will be done from the Azure portal by using the create a resource link. And from there we're going to create Azure virtual networking resources that will be used to provide inbound and outbound access to our Azure environment.