Management and governance

The Azure portal

By using the Azure portal, a web-based user interface, you can access virtually every feature of Azure. The Azure portal provides a friendly, graphical UI to view all the services you're using, create new services, configure your services, and view reports. The Azure portal is how most users first experience Azure. But, as your Azure usage grows, you'll likely choose a more repeatable code-centric approach to managing your Azure resources.

The Azure mobile app

The Azure mobile app provides iOS and Android access to your Azure resources when you're away from your computer. With it, you can:

• Monitor the health and status of your Azure resources.

• Check for alerts, quickly diagnose and fix issues, and restart a web app or virtual machine (VM).

• Run the Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell commands to manage your Azure resources.

Azure PowerShell

Azure PowerShell is a shell with which developers and DevOps and IT professionals can execute commands called cmdlets (pronounced command-lets). These commands call the Azure Rest API to perform every possible management task in Azure. Cmdlets can be executed independently or combined into a script file and executed together to orchestrate:

• The routine setup, teardown, and maintenance of a single resource or multiple connected resources.

• The deployment of an entire infrastructure, which might contain dozens or hundreds of resources, from imperative code.

Capturing the commands in a script makes the process repeatable and automatable.

Azure PowerShell is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac, and you can access it in a web browser via Azure Cloud Shell.

Windows PowerShell has helped Windows-centric IT organizations automate many of their on-premises operations for years, and these organizations have built up a large catalog of custom scripts and cmdlets, as well as expertise.

The Azure CLI

The Azure CLI command-line interface is an executable program with which a developer, DevOps professional, or IT professional can execute commands in Bash. The commands call the Azure Rest API to perform every possible management task in Azure. You can run the commands independently or combined into a script and executed together for the routine setup, teardown, and maintenance of a single resource or an entire environment.

In many respects, the Azure CLI is almost identical to Azure PowerShell in what you can do with it. Both run on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and can be accessed in a web browser via Cloud Shell. The primary difference is the syntax you use. If you're already proficient in PowerShell or Bash, you can use the tool you prefer.

ARM templates

Although it's possible to write imperative code in Azure PowerShell or the Azure CLI to set up and tear down one Azure resource or orchestrate an infrastructure comprising hundreds of resources, there's a better way to implement this functionality.

By using Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates), you can describe the resources you want to use in a declarative JSON format. The benefit is that the entire ARM template is verified before any code is executed to ensure that the resources will be created and connected correctly. The template then orchestrates the creation of those resources in parallel. That is, if you need 50 instances of the same resource, all 50 instances are created at the same time.

Ultimately, the developer, DevOps professional, or IT professional needs only to define the desired state and configuration of each resource in the ARM template, and the template does the rest. Templates can even execute PowerShell and Bash scripts before or after the resource has been set up.