How To Get Started With Azure

A step-by-step Guide for Absolute Beginner

Cloud Computing is everywhere and is the most demanding and sought-after skill that companies are looking for. Most companies either have plans to migrate to the cloud from on-prem or already migrated their workloads. There is a shortage of Cloud Engineers and this is a great time to enter into cloud computing. We have a few cloud providers out there such as GCP, AWS, Azure, OCI, etc.

Azure is a cloud computing platform from Microsoft. Microsoft Azure lets you create future-ready innovations across all of your environments using the newest technologies. You can even sign up for an Azure free account and get popular services free for 12 months. In this post, we will see how we can see how to get started with Microsoft Azure step by step.

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Creating an Account

You can click on the create and login with your Microsoft account or you can create one.

If you are creating the account you are asked to verify your account with the code. Once you provide the code and set up the account, it will take you to the profile page where you enter your profile information, and card details for the verification and agreement as below.

Once you provide all this information and you can check the agreement checkboxes and hit the sign-up button.

Once done, you can see the below page and click on the Build in the portal button and you will be redirected to the portal dashboard as below.

When you click on the home and you can see the commonly used resource's dashboard and you can navigate through on the left blade as well.

Azure Hierarchy

Let’s understand the Hierarchy. First, we need to have a tenant/ Azure Active Directory and every tenant has a root management group called Root Tenant Group. If you don’t create any management groups further all the subscriptions are tied to this root management group.

You can create management groups and subscriptions under the root management group. You can create child management groups under the management group as well based on your need.

Subscriptions can be created under a management group and each management group can have multiple subscriptions as long as these subscriptions belong to the same tenant. An Azure subscription has a trust relationship with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). A subscription trusts Azure AD to authenticate users, services, and devices. Multiple subscriptions can trust the same Azure AD directory. Each subscription can only trust a single directory.

You can create resource groups under each subscription and you can create as many as you want based on your need.

Understand Management Groups and Subscriptions

Management Groups are nothing but groups where you can manage multiple subscriptions. Management groups are containers that help you manage access, policy, and compliance across multiple subscriptions. Create these containers to build an effective and efficient hierarchy that can be used with Azure Policy and Azure Role-Based Access Controls.

According to Microsoft Docs, If your organization has many subscriptions, you may need a way to efficiently manage access, policies, and compliance for those subscriptions. Azure management groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions. You organize subscriptions into containers called “management groups” and apply your governance conditions to the management groups. All subscriptions within a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied to the management group.

For example, every account has a Root Management Group called Root Tenant Group and you can create other management groups (Ex: IT Department) and subscriptions under it. You can even create child Management Groups (Ex: Core Services Department, Marketing Department)..

Subscriptions are nothing but the entity that group all of the resources that you use under one billing account.

According to the Microsoft website, A subscription is an agreement with Microsoft to use one or more Microsoft cloud platforms or services, for which charges accrue based on either a per-user license fee or on cloud-based resource consumption.

Organizations can have multiple subscriptions. User accounts for all of Microsoft’s cloud offerings are stored in an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant, which contains user accounts and groups. User accounts are stored in an Azure AD tenant.

You have created an account and clicked on the subscriptions in the dashboard and you can see one subscription which is free tier one.