Getting Started with Azure

If you are getting started with Azure you might come across a few key terms that it’s important to have a good understanding of. In this blog I'll touch upon the core Azure architectural components like 

- Azure Regions and Availability Zones.

- Tenant, Subscriptions, Resource Groups and Resources.

- Sign up for a free Azure Account.

- Access the Azure Portal.

Let's start with Azure Docs Home Page

This page will give you a detailed overview of all the services available in Azure.

Azure Regions and Availability Zones

Region is a geographical area on the planet that contains at least one but potentially multiple datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network. Pls refer to Azure Regions map.

Availability Zones are physically separate data centers within an Azure region. Each availability zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. An availability zone is set up to be an isolation boundary. If one zone goes down, the other continues working. Availability zones are connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks. Pls refer to the Availability Zones map

Azure Tenant and Subscription

Tenant is a representation of an organization.  It refers to a single instance of Azure Active Directory, or, as it is often called “Azure AD”. Azure AD is a key piece of Microsoft’s cloud platform as it provides a single place to manage users, groups and the permissions they hold in relation to applications published in Azure AD. 

Azure AD Tenants are globally unique and are scoped using a domain that ends with ‘onmicrosoft.com’ (i.e. myazuread.onmicrosoft.com) and each has a ‘Tenant ID’ in the form of an UUID/GUID. Typically customers choose to connect their internal Active Directory environment to Azure AD to allow single or same sign-on for their staff and will also use a custom domain instead of the default ‘onmicrosoft.com’.

Subscription is a logical container into which any number of resources (Virtual Machines, Web Apps, Storage Accounts, etc) can be deployed.  

Resource Groups is a container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. The resource group includes resources that you want to manage as a group. 

Resource are instances of services which you can simply create, like Storage, Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks or SQL databases.

Sign up for a free Azure Account

- Point your browser to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/

-  Login using your MSN Live or Outlook account. The registration process is pretty much self explanatory.  You'll be asked to provide your credit card info for validation purposes but you won't be charged unless you exceed $200 limit. You should have your Azure account ready in less than 15 minutes. 

- Login to Azure Portal https://portal.azure.com using your initial admin user and password. Your home page will look something like below.

Conclusion

In this post we learnt about Azure Services, Regions, Availability Zones, Tenant and Subscription. We also created a new trial subscription and able to login to the Azure Portal. This is a good start to explore the exciting features of Azure Platform.