Wednesday Featured Forums: Azure

Greetings Everyone

Welcome to another Wednesday featured forum, today we will be looking at the Azure Forums.

What is Azure? Microsoft Azure is a growing collection of integrated cloud services that developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy, and manage applications through our global network of datacenters. With Azure, you get the freedom to build and deploy wherever you want, using the tools, applications, and frameworks of your choice. (Taken from MS site)

Microsoft Azure lets you do everything from creating Virtual machines, to linking your on-premise servers to the cloud to having your Sites hosted and also the ability to have slots so you can test things before rolling out to production.

To move away slightly from the main topic, signing up to Azure is so simple. Enter in your details and a valid credit card and Microsoft gives you $200 dollars to try out the cloud platform before you move all your applications and servers across. (Just an FYI, you can only use one account or you will get an error signing up if you have a previous account on Pay-As-You-Go).

With technologies like SQL, Virtual Machines on the latest Operating Systems etc. you have everything at your fingertips and you have the ability to import your machines on-premise as well.

When it comes to support, a ticket logged from the portal is responded to very quickly in my experience with them.

As per my previous feature forum on PowerShell, A lot of things can be done on both the portal and Azure PowerShell but there are some limitations when it comes new features that are either only available to be configured on the portal or via PowerShell.

If you want to see the portal, just navigate to the following link below, you will need to sign-in:

  • Portal.azure.com (New Portal)
  • manage.windowsazure.com (Old Portal)

Coming back to the forums, I believe this is one of the biggest forums currently (no offence to the other forums) but the focus of Microsoft's is the cloud.

Firstly to access these forums you can come here:

If you are familiar with Azure, you can relate to the questions that are asked like Resource Manager, ARM, JSON etc.

You might think that this is also a O365 Forum due to the questions asked but in Azure you are able to link your Office 365 Tenant to Azure.

Here is an example question of a person asking to link services in Azure:

I encourage you to ask questions in any forum. No question is stupid. By doing so you will get it answered and that answer will help someone else out there that has the same question as you.

There are also many websites/blogs out there where people have done setups of a technology in Azure and written JSON templates for example, here are a couple for you to go through:

If you google anything like creating an Azure VM, Microsoft have documents that provide detailed information about the command as well as examples.

You can see blogs about teach you things about Azure:

That is all for now folks, good luck to all those moving to Azure.

All the Best

Edward