AZ900 Cert Prep :: Lesson 10 : Features and Tools for Managing and Deploying Resources

Azure Portal

• This is the most common way for creating and managing Azure resources
• The Azure Portal is a web-based portal for deploying and managing Azure Resources.
• It is fully customizable and personal
• Supports dashboards, so you can customize your view based on specific needs.

To customize dashboards ;

Click on gear item on the top panel (beside the search bar) | Select "Appearance + startup views" | Scroll down to "startup views" and then select the dashboard option | Go to homepage | You can see your new dashboard, by default, it's named "My Dashboard" | You can create a new dashboard by clicking on "+Create" [Maybe you have a web app and some VMs, so you can create separate dashboards for each of them at your convenience] | Since we already have a new dashboard, we can edit it using the "Edit" option. | Select any widget you want to add, and then grab the tile to move or expand it as you want (not all tiles can be resized) | Click on save

The widgets you choose show you real-time data and if you click on them, they will lead you to their dedicated page for additional information

Command-line Tools

• Azure offers a couple of command-line tools for creating and managing Azure resources.
• Both of these tools are multi-platform (i.e., work on Windows, MacOS and Linux)
• There 2 main tools are : Azure Powershell : is a powershell cmdlet implemented using the AZ module and some Azure services have enhanced capabilities by installing extensions to that AZ module. Azure Command-line interface (CLI) is an installable command-line interface that runs from any console
• Which once you use is based purely on preference. But the advantages of having these command line tools is that they can be scripted so you can perform complex deployments and management operations quickly using scripts.
• Another command-line option is Azure Cloud Shell, and Cloud Shell brings both Powershell and the CLI into the Azure Portal and into Azure documentation [you know how there's sometimes an option in the documentation to run the code in an independent environment, that uses the Azure Cloud Shell in the background]
• Since Cloud Shell is a web-based, it's available on any platform, whether it's an Android phone, or an iPhone or iPad.

Working with Azure Cloud Shell

When you're in you homepage, click on the terminal icon, right next to the search bar, this opens the Cloud shell on the bottom part of the screen

NOTE : Cloud shell actually uses a storage account and it saves information for your cloud shell sessions inside that storage account. So if you install modules or extensions, they will be available to you from every place since it's going to store them in Azure Storage

Let's see what you can do in Azure Cloud Shell

Open the powershell prompt, let's run a couple of commands using AZ module

If you type get -azresource and hit enter, this would give you a list of all your different Azure resources, | You can modify how that's output, by get -azresource | format-table now you get all your resources output in a table format

You can also specify which properties you want

get -azresource | format-table -property Name, Location

Now you'll get a table with just those properties in it. You can also get the output on different formats, for example

get -azresource | convertto-json you get the output in json format

get -azresource | convertto-html now get it in HTML format

And ofcourse you can pipe this output to a txt file if you want to save the output.

Now let's try out a few commands in the Bash Shell. The format is a little different, you start with az and then you start with an item name, and then what you want to do with that item. So again, let's say we want to list all our resources, our code would be

az resource list

Notice that this command, by default, prints output as a json. If you wanted to see it in a table, you use

az resource list --output table

You can also specify the column names by

az resource list --output table --query "[].{ResourceGroup : resourceGroup, Name : name}"

You can read further in the documentation.

Azure Arc

• Extends Azure management and governance capabilities to resources that are outside of Azure (meaning the resources are on-premises or even on other cloud)
• Arc enabled servers brings Azure management and governance features to physical servers and VMs running Windows, or Linux, that are on-premises or in other cloud

When one of these servers is brought into Azure Arc, it's considered a "hybrid machine" and it's assigned an Azure resources identifier so it can even be added to one of your Azure resource groups.

Arc enabled service works by installing the Azure connected machine agent on the machine, and you can install that agent on the machine, and you can install that agent on a single machine or a number of machines

Also offers a feature called Arc-enabled Kubernetes and this feature makes it easy to bring Azure management and governance features to your Kubernetes clusters running on-premises or in other clouds

In addition, Azure Arc can run some other services on top of Arc-enabled Kubernetes, including Arc-enabled data services which let you to extend Azure Arc functionality to SQL managed instances and PostSQL which are two popular database services in Azure and also Azure Application Services, which is an extension that runs on top of Arc-enabled Kubernetes and it allows you to run Azure web apps, Azure API management, and also Azure event grid features, either on-premises or on another cloud.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

• It's a system for creating and managing resources.
• ARM was developed to ensure predictability and repeatability when creating resources.
• ARM uses a declarative syntax which means you don't have to tell ARM how to do something, you only need to tell ARM what to do and it does it on it's own.

How do you tell ARM what to do?

You can use many tools like Azure Portal, Azure Powershell and the CLI. But you can also use an ARM template. ARM templates are XML files, that declare operations for ARM to complete.

Demo : Go back to the Azure portal | Click on any resource | And from the menu in the left panel, find "Export template" | When you click on that, you'd be able to see the ARM template that was used to deploy that resources