Tips & Tricks (Part 6): Get The Most Out of Azure!

Here are some Tips & Tricks that will hopefully help you to get the MOST out of Microsoft Azure.

The new Azure Cloud Shell provides an authenticated, browser-based shell experience hosted in Azure, and is accessible from anywhere.

Azure takes care of managing and updating Cloud Shell with commonly used command line tools and support for multiple popular programming languages, so that you can stay productive. 

Each Cloud Shell session provides a ready-to-use environment automatically synced to a $Home directory that is stored in Azure to enable persisting files such as your favorite automation scripts. Azure Cloud Shell maximizes versatility and productivity.

Azure offers a wide range of services, and learning the fundamentals on how to do basic management on everything can be scary. 

The Azure portal provides a consistent experience that covers finding an instance of a resource. The image below highlights some of the common patterns using the Virtual Machine overview screen as an example.

Management landing pages for most resources contain the same structure and basic elements, so once you learn a few patterns, you can apply them across most of the portal.

The image above shows the overview pages for App Service, Virtual Machine, Storage and SQL. Notice that all screens follow the structure introduced in the previous image.

Building cloud applications is a hard task, and making the most out of the platform is even harder. Azure Advisor helps you make the most out of Azure by providing recommendations for improving cost, availability, security, and performance.

Azure Advisor is available by default in the left navigation bar. Once you get to Azure Advisor, you can select the subscriptions the platform will provide the best recommendations to help you optimize your applications and infrastructure.

Azure Advisor notifications have been directly integrated in the virtual machine overview page in the form of a status bar that when clicked takes you directly to Azure Advisor to see your recommendations and take action.

Azure Advisor in the Virtual Machine blade (blue banner at the top)

Quickstart Center is an experience that Microsoft launched as a preview for Build with the goal of helping customers that are new to the platform take their first steps in Azure. 

Microsoft have also extended the features of Quickstart Center by adding playbooks, which are sets of instructions to help you set up your Azure environment with Microsoft recommended best practices and governance guidelines. We help you with topics like managing access through RBAC, organizing and tagging your resources, securing your resources, enforcing compliance, and monitoring the health of your Azure environment.

Azure Resource Graph (ARG) provides a fast and rich way to query through large sets of Azure Resources. In this release we will be previewing an experience that uses ARG in the All Resources blade, one of the most popular entry points in the popular.

This new experience is not only faster and design to work with a very large set of resources but also explores different ways of navigating the results set via facets. We have also integrated ARG in the global search, so you can enjoy a faster experience when using the search bar at the top of the portal.

Please note that the UI for this experience is evolving. Microsoft look forward to our feedback to help us design a great resource browsing experience for Azure, so please feel free to reach out after you try this new experience and let me know your thoughts.

Cheers,

Susanth