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In this course you’ll learn the basic elements of Azure, subscriptions, tenants, availability- and failover zones and more.

You will learn how to set these up for yourself or your client so that you have the best and most cost-effective solution to build on.

Also, you’ll learn about Azure Resource Manager and Azure Bicep. And you’ll discover other tools to work with Azure, including the Azure CLI, PowerShell, Data Studio, Storage Explorer, VS Code and Visual Studio.

On top of that, you’ll learn how to think about costs in the cloud and how to reduce them.

Welcome to "Getting Started with Microsoft Azure"

In this course, you'll establish a solid foundation in Microsoft Azure by understanding the following key concepts:

We'll introduce you to a range of tools that you can use to work with Azure and explain how they integrate with the Azure Resource Manager.

Additionally, a bonus module will cover techniques for managing and reducing costs in Azure, which is critical for efficient cloud usage.

This course is concise but packed with essential information to get you started on your Azure journey.

Ready to dive in? Let's get started and build a strong foundation in Microsoft Azure!

TLBMA trailer

Hi. And welcome to this course getting started with Microsoft Azure. I'm
really glad you're here.
So
what will you learn in this course? Well,
the basics of
azure.
So you're probably thinking, Well, OK,
I'm gonna deploy things to a Web app with a SQL server.
Yes, that's for later courses.
But in this course, you will learn the basics,
and that's necessary.
So you will learn what a subscription is, what a management group is,
what a resource group is and how all of these things fit together,
how to organise subscriptions,
which types of subscriptions and support plans there are,
and how that ties in with azure active directory.
We'll also take a look at lots of tools that you can use
to work with azure and how they work with the azure resource manager.
And in addition to that,
there's also a bonus module that will explain
how to manage and reduce costs in leisure.
So
when you're done with this course, which is not a long course, by the way,
then you will be ready to actually get started with
azure,
and then you'll have the foundation to set up your subscriptions and your working
area in Azure in the right way and actually understand what you're doing.
So
let's get started

Barry is an independent software architect and developer with a passion for the cloud. He is also a Pluralsight and Udemy author and a podcast host. He has worked for lots of companies throughout the last decades and is keen to share his knowledge with the community. He has a broad and deep knowledge of the Microsoft stack with a special interest on web technology and the cloud. He currently teaches people about all things programming, including the benefits of the cloud, the web, Windows and C#.

Barry Luijbregts

Software developer and architect

TLBMA 2-1

. I'm Barry and I'll be your instructor. I'm a software developer and architect with a passion for the cloud.

This course covers the basics of Microsoft Azure. Here’s a breakdown of what you'll be learning:

Microsoft Azure is a part of a broader Microsoft cloud ecosystem that includes:

All of these subscriptions belong to an organization. Subscriptions can contain licenses that you need to assign. For instance, licenses in Azure are used by virtual machines such as Windows Server or SQL Server.

A tenant in Azure is essentially an Azure Active Directory (AD), housing users, devices, application registrations, and more. Microsoft's cloud offerings can share a tenant.

Management groups in Azure act like folders and serve as boundaries for organizing subscriptions:

This course is designed to provide you with a solid foundation to get started working with Microsoft Azure.

1. Organizations, Subscriptions, Licenses, Accounts and Tenants

TLBMA 2-2

An Azure subscription is a basic Azure element or container used to manage resources like databases, functions, Kubernetes, and more. It helps in managing which users have access to the subscription and the resources within it, as well as their permissions. Additionally, a subscription serves as a billing scope to which you can couple a credit card to manage billing information, limits, and quotas.

 within one subscription. You can also couple multiple subscriptions to one Azure Active Directory tenant.

Azure offers a variety of subscription types to cater to different needs:

Azure offers several support plans to cater to different needs. The key differences lie in response times and the level of support provided:

For Azure development, it's advisable to use Visual Studio subscription credits or a "Pay As You Go" Dev Test subscription. For production workloads, "Pay As You Go" is commonly used, especially for larger organizations. Choose the support plan according to your needs based on the impact level and desired response times.

2. A Closer Look at Azure Subscriptions and Support Plans

TLBMA 2-3

When getting started with subscriptions and support plans, it's crucial to comprehend the associated costs, particularly within Azure. This guide will walk you through how to estimate these costs with Azure's pricing calculator.

Example: Estimating the Cost of a Virtual Machine

Understanding Azure pricing and using tools like the Azure Price Calculator can help you efficiently plan and manage your budget. By leveraging discounts, committing to savings plans, and understanding regional cost variations, you can optimize your expenditure on Azure services.

3. Using the Azure Pricing Calculator

TLBMA 2-4

Welcome to our guide on creating your first Azure subscription! Whether you opt for a free account or a pay-as-you-go account, the process is similar. Let's walk through the steps together.

Both options provide the same core benefits when you first start. For this tutorial, let's choose the 

You need to sign in with either a Microsoft or GitHub account.

You'll need to enable two-factor authentication. It's always a good practice to use multi-factor authentication along with a password manager like LastPass.

Read and agree to the customer agreement. You can opt-out of receiving promotional emails.

You'll need to provide your credit card details for verification purposes. However, Microsoft will not charge you unless you upgrade or exceed the free tier limits.

Step 6: Optional Call with Microsoft Salesperson

You can optionally schedule a call with a Microsoft salesperson to discuss your new subscription. This step is part of the marketing funnel and not mandatory.

Navigate to the Azure Portal to manage your subscription.

In the Azure Portal, you can view your Azure subscriptions. Your subscription will be associated with your existing Azure Active Directory tenant.

If you have a Visual Studio subscription, you can access Azure credits through the Visual Studio Subscribers portal.

In the Azure Portal, you can manage your subscriptions. Here are a few key features:

If you're a Microsoft Azure MVP, you may have a sponsorship subscription. These subscriptions offer specific benefits, such as a $12,000 per year sponsorship. You can manage your sponsored amount through a special portal.

Creating and managing an Azure subscription is straightforward. Whether you're using it through Visual Studio benefits, sponsorship subscriptions, or individual sign-ups, Azure provides a robust platform for your cloud computing needs.

4. Create Your first Azure Subscription

TLBMA 2-5

Creating a single Azure subscription is easy, but in real-world scenarios, you likely need something more complex. Let’s dive into the best practices for managing Azure subscriptions effectively.

As your Azure usage grows, you may require multiple subscriptions for different production services.

Additional Tips for Subscription Management

Adopting these practices ensures that your Azure usage remains organized, secure, and cost-effective. Remember, the complexity of your environment might necessitate these advanced strategies, and automation can significantly ease subscription management.

5. Azure Subscription Design Best Practices

TLBMA 2-6

Understanding Azure Active Directory (AAD)

Azure Active Directory (AAD) is an essential identity and access management service run by Azure. It plays a central role in maintaining security across your Azure organization by managing user roles and access.

If you have an on-premises Active Directory, you can sync it with AAD using 

. An AAD instance is tied to a physical region, an important consideration for where your user identity data is stored.

, which is part of the broader set of Azure APIs. This makes AAD a highly secure and integral part of not just Azure, but all of Microsoft's cloud services, including Outlook.com and Xbox.

Azure Active Directory is fundamental to securing your Azure environment. Whether you need to manage internal users or integrate with external partners, AAD offers robust security features and seamless integration with other Microsoft services. Remember to leverage additional tools like Azure Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud to enhance your security posture further.

6. A Closer Look at Azure Active Directory

TLBMA 2-7

Welcome to this engaging tutorial on using Azure Active Directory (AAD) within the Microsoft Azure portal! In this video, we cover the essential features and functionalities of AAD, now part of Microsoft Entra. Below, you'll find a comprehensive summary of the key points discussed.

7. Managing Users and Permissions in Azure

TLBMA 2-8

Module Summary: A Dive into Microsoft Cloud and Azure Services

In the next module, we'll delve deeper into more elements of Azure to further expand your understanding. Stay tuned!

8. Summary

TLBMA 3-1

Let's talk about some high availability concepts in Azure, namely availability zones and fault and update domains.

Azure is enormous, with numerous data centers across the globe. Microsoft continually expands these data centers, adding new regions and enhancing existing ones. The azure regions cover a vast portion of the world, as illustrated by the dots on the global map.

An example region is the Greece region, which contains multiple (e.g., three) data centers known as availability zones. These zones are separate physical locations with their own power, cooling, and infrastructure.

The main benefit of availability zones is their role in redundancy. If one or more data centers within a region fail, your application can continue running in a different data center, ensuring continuous availability.

Zooming into one of these availability zones, we see it as a physical location housing server racks with physical servers running Azure services. Even serverless services run on these physical servers.

Each server rack in an availability zone is a fault domain. A fault domain is a group of servers sharing a power source and a network switch.

Multiple fault domains within an availability zone provide redundancy. If a network switch fails, your application can continue running on other fault domains.

Within each fault domain are update domains, which are logical groupings of hardware that can be rebooted together. Update domains are essential for virtual machines (VMs).

Update domains allow for sequential rebooting during patching, ensuring high availability.

Fault and update domains are configured when deploying Azure VMs using Availability Sets. Availability Sets automatically deploy sets of VMs across fault and update domains, simplifying deployment and management.

Azure also offers the option to deploy VMs on dedicated hosts:

Using fault domains, update domains, and availability sets in Azure ensures that your applications remain highly available and resilient, even during failures or maintenance events.

9. Regions, Datacenters, Availability zones, Fault-, and Update Domains

TLBMA 3-2

Understanding Management Groups and Policy in Azure

In the context of an organization, Azure resources are organized hierarchically, providing a structured framework for managing access, rules, and policies. Here's a breakdown of the different levels:

All these levels can be used to set access, rules, and policies. They can also be artifacts of an Azure blueprint, which is a predefined set of rules and resources designed to accomplish a specific goal, such as complying with an ISO standard.

Policies are rules that can be assigned to any of these scopes and can be part of a blueprint. For example, a policy could restrict the use of certain VM sizes.

Management groups act like folders that can contain subscriptions and other management groups. They help manage costs and access control within an organization.

Understanding these concepts and using the Azure portal effectively can significantly streamline the management of resources and compliance within your organization.

10. Government with Management Groups, Blueprints and Azure Policy

TLBMA 3-3

Azure Resource Groups: A Comprehensive Guide

Welcome to the lesson on Azure Resource Groups. This is an essential aspect of managing and organizing your Azure resources efficiently.

An Azure Resource Group is like a folder that can contain one or more Azure resources like an Azure SQL database, a Kubernetes cluster, and more. It acts as a boundary similar to a management group or Azure subscription, allowing you to organize and control access to resources efficiently.

A Resource Group has a geographical location (e.g., West US). This location is used to store metadata and deployment information. However, the resources within the group can be located anywhere.

Resource Groups can also have tags, which are key-value pairs used for various purposes like cost management (e.g., Tag: Environment, Value: Dev).

Resource Groups are free; you don't pay for them.

Resource groups and individual resources can have locks placed on them to prevent accidental changes or deletions.

Azure Resource Groups are crucial for efficient resource management, offering features like organizational boundaries, access control, deployment records, and tagging. They are free and can significantly ease the administration of Azure resources.

11. A Closer Look at Resource Groups, Locks and Deployments and Tags

TLBMA 3-4

Module Summary: Working with Azure Regions, Data Centers, and Resource Management

After covering regions, data centers, availability zones, fault domains, and update domains, as well as resource management with Azure Blueprints and Resource Groups, we are well-prepared to move forward.

12. Summary

TLBMA 4-1

This course is all about the practical basics of Azure. In this section, we will discuss one of the most essential basic elements: Azure Resource Manager.

Azure Resource Manager is used to manage all resources in Azure. It allows you to create, update, and delete resources. Additionally, it manages other aspects such as locks, tags, and access control, like we saw earlier. All of these are managed through Azure Resource Manager, the central hub.

You can interact with Azure Resource Manager through APIs, which can be accessed by tools like the Azure portal and other tools such as REST clients. There are SDKs that communicate with the APIs, which we'll see later. For example, you can use Azure PowerShell and the Azure CLI to make use of these SDKs.

All capabilities of the APIs will be represented in the Azure portal within 180 days.

Azure Resource Manager is the core of Azure and controls everything. It not only manages services within Azure but also resources in the hierarchy, including management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups.

13. Azure Resource Manager Deploys and Manages Services in Azure

TLBMA 4-2

Managing Resources with Azure Resource Manager

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the core service in Azure for managing resources with infrastructure as code. This document will walk you through using ARM templates and Azure Bicep to deploy resources.

An ARM template is a JSON file that defines the infrastructure and configuration for your Azure solution. It consists of a main template and usually a parameters file. These templates can describe the deployment of one or more resources in Azure.

Azure Bicep is an abstraction language on top of ARM, designed to simplify the authoring of ARM templates.

Bicep and ARM templates both serve as infrastructure as code tools allowing you to deploy Azure resources efficiently. You can choose either based on your preference and comfort. Both need a basic understanding of their respective syntax and usage.

14. Create Infrastructure-as-Code with ARM And Bicep

TLBMA 4-3

Working with Azure: An Overview of Microsoft Tools

In this video, we covered various Microsoft tools available for working with Azure. While there are many third-party tools, this overview focuses on tools provided by Microsoft.

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

In the next clips, we'll demonstrate the practical use of these tools. We'll also discuss the differences between the data management tools mentioned above and see them in action.

15. Tools for Working with Azure

TLBMA 4-4

I've installed Azure CLI locally, enabling me to use it from my command prompt.

Before I can use it, I need to log into Azure with the 

 command. This will open a browser window allowing me to log into my account.

Now, I can use various Azure CLI commands. All these commands interact with the Azure APIs exposed by the Azure Resource Manager.

Let's try creating an Azure Storage account using the following command:

Run the command, and it begins the provisioning process.

Once complete, you can view your newly created storage account in the Azure Portal.

The Azure CLI is just one interface to Azure APIs, similar to the Azure Portal.

In the Azure Portal, I can use the Azure Cloud Shell, accessible via 

, which offers both Bash and PowerShell prompts. Let's open a PowerShell prompt.

This is Azure PowerShell running in the cloud, and Azure CLI is also available in Cloud Shell. This feature is really convenient for using Azure CLI without needing to install it on your local machine.

Creating a Storage Account in Cloud Shell

We can create a storage account using PowerShell, equivalent to the Azure CLI command we used earlier:

Run the command, and the storage account is created.

In the Azure Portal, navigate to the resource group, and you will see the storage account created with Azure PowerShell.

The Azure CLI and Azure Cloud Shell are powerful interfaces for managing Azure resources, providing flexibility and ease of use. Whether locally or via the cloud, managing your Azure environment is straightforward and efficient!

16. Working with the CLI and Azure PowerShell and Cloud Shell

TLBMA 4-5

Here we are in the Azure portal, and this is a storage account. From here, I can open the Azure Storage Explorer. Let's do it.

Another application to work with data in Azure is the Azure Data Studio. I also installed this on my local machine.

The final data tool that I want to show you is my favourite, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).

In summary, choose the appropriate tool based on your platform, and the specific data management task you need to perform.

17. Working With Azure Data Studio, Azure Storage Explorer and SQL Server Management

TLBMA 4-6

Integrating Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code with Azure

In this module, we'll learn how to leverage the power of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code to work seamlessly with Azure. We will explore how these development environments can simplify your workflow by integrating directly with Azure services using SDKs and extensions.

Visual Studio: A Comprehensive Development Environment

Visual Studio is a robust and feature-rich development environment, making it a favorite among developers. It offers comprehensive tools and integrations that automate a lot of the development and deployment processes.

Visual Studio Code: A Lightweight But Powerful Editor

While Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a more lightweight editor, it is highly extensible and can be tailored to your needs using extensions.

By leveraging the tools and extensions available in both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, you can significantly enhance your productivity and streamline your development workflow with Azure. These integrations allow for seamless development, resource management, and deployment, making your development process more efficient.

18. Working with VS Code and Visual Studio

TLBMA 4-7

We've covered several foundational aspects of working with Azure. Let's summarize the key points discussed:

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the core component of Azure.

Tools to Simplify Infrastructure Deployment

There are several tools that help make working with ARM templates easier:

Azure provides robust APIs that many tools leverage, including:

Azure offers various command-line tools for managing resources:

These can be installed on your machine or accessed through the Azure Cloud Shell.

There are additional tools designed for specific tasks and preferences:

Azure provides a wide range of tools and options. It's up to you to explore and find the ones that best suit your workflow and preferences.

19. Summary

TLBMA 5-1

Understanding Cloud Costs: A Comprehensive Guide

In this guide, we will explore the different aspects that incur costs when using cloud services. This knowledge is essential for recommending effective solutions to clients for monitoring and minimizing costs.

The primary cost in the cloud comes from the services you use. Common examples include:

These services accrue costs based on usage time. For instance, a VM running 24/7 will incur charges continuously.

Data storage in the cloud incurs charges based on:

Network traffic, the data transferring in and out of the cloud's data centers, affects costs:

Cloud services often require software licenses, which can be:

To summarize, the main cost components in the cloud include:

1. Organizations, Subscriptions, Licenses, Accounts and Tenants

Getting Started with Microsoft Azure

What is this course about?

Basic Elements of Azure Organizations

Microsoft Cloud Offerings

Understanding Tenants

Types of Azure Clouds

Management Groups