Cover image for Azure Management Tasks Part 1: How to Prepare Your Environment.

SULIAT

What is Azure Management?

Azure management refers to the tasks and processes required to maintain your business applications and the resources that support them not just in Azure, but across other clouds and on-premises environments too. Think of it as a lifecycle. Every resource you create goes through stages: it's deployed, it runs and gets maintained, and eventually it's retired. Azure management covers all of that, from start to finish.

You can't practice managing cloud resources if you don't have any resources to manage. So before diving into monitoring, governance, or security in Azure, the first job is simple: build something.

In this walkthrough, we'll stand up a small but complete environment: a resource group to hold everything, a virtual network for connectivity, a Linux virtual machine to act as our compute workload, and a storage account. Nothing fancy, just enough real infrastructure to give the later management work something to actually apply to.

Before You Start

You'll want:

  • A working Azure account with an active subscription.
  • Rough familiarity with what a VM, VNet, and storage account are (you don't need deep expertise yet).
  • A few minutes to click through the Azure portal.

One small piece of advice: if your subscription already has other resources sitting in it, jot down what they are. It'll save you from accidentally tearing down something important later on.

Step 1: Create a resource group

Everything we build needs a home, and in Azure that home is a resource group i.e. a logical container that groups related resources together so they're easier to manage, and easier to delete all at once when you're done.

Step 2: Create a virtual network with one subnet.

Step 3: Create a virtual machine.

Step 4: Create a Storage account.

What You've Got Now

At this point, your subscription contains a small but functioning environment: one resource group holding a virtual network, a virtual machine, and a storage account. It's not meant to be production-grade. It's a sandbox, purpose-built so that the next parts of this series have something real to work with.

From here, the natural next step is to go deeper into the network configuration we glossed over subnets, address spaces, and security rules which is exactly where we'll pick up next.