Azure Management Tools

In our last blog post of Microsoft Azure series we understood What is Azure and also had an introduction about Virtual Networks (VNets). In this article we will see various Azure Management tools.

Azure portal 

Provides a web based user interface for managing the azure subscriptions and services and for most of the deployment portals are considered as primary management tools.

Full Azure Management Portal 

Implemented as web application at https://manage.windowsazure.com  provided we are sign in using Microsoft account or an organisational account can also be used which is associated with Azure Subscriptions.

We can use the full Azure Management Portal for Provisioning Services, Managing Services, Adding Co-Administrators.


The New Azure Portal

The new portal https://portal.azure.com represent many changes when compared to the Full Azure Management Portal.

* Most of the tasks can be performed from both the above portals however few tasks are only available in the Full Azure Management Portal, and few preview features are only available in The New Azure Portal. Reference for Navigating the Azure Portal.

Windows PowerShell

PowerShell provides scripting platform for managing Windows, and can be extended to various infrastructure solutions like Azure known as Azure PowerShell.

Azure PowerShell can be installed through Web API (Azure PowerShell Download) and can be installed using the PowerShell Gallery. But there are few more tasks that need to be taken care when installing the PowerShell, i would suggest refer Azure Installation and Configuration for a complete list of steps.

There are two PowerShell Libraries which can be installed for management of Windows Azure.

1) The Azure PowerShell Module

Azure PowerShell Module is primary PowerShell Library which can be used for the management of Microsoft Azure Services and includes modules like Azure (Core Set of cmdlets for managing Azure Services), Azure Resource Manager (Set of cmdlets for managing resource groups) and Azure Profile (cmdlets for managing authentication and execution context).

2) The Azure AD PowerShell Module

If we are planning to implement Azure AD in our environment we can install AD PowerShell library to manage user and, groups. Before we proceed with the installation of the Azure AD PowerShell module we need to ensure that the installation of Microsoft Online Services Single Sign-In Assistant  has been taken care.

For more information refer Microsoft Azure Essentials