Wikipedia says: “Microsoft Azure, commonly referred to as Azure, is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.” Wiki also says: “Azure was announced in October 2008, and released on February 1, 2010, as Windows Azure before being renamed to Microsoft Azure on March 25, 2014.”

It is one of the three largest cloud providers. Azure literally means “bright blue color of the cloudless sky”.

Learning with YouTube

Here is a YouTube video that introduces the Cloud and Azure. It’s called What Is Azure? | Microsoft Azure Tutorial For Beginners | Microsoft Azure Training | Simplilearn.

Here is a YouTube video on the topic called Microsoft Azure for Beginners: Introduction – Scott Duffy. This video was posted in the year 2018. Scott Duffy has several courses on Udemy.com.

Here’s a longer video called Build a Company in Azure. It’s by Daniel “Azure Dan” Baker. It’s 2 hours and 40 minutes long and it’s for Azure beginners. It was put up on Mar 13, 2018.

Free Account

You can set up a free account at Azure. You can always sign up for an Azure account for free. When you do this, you get $200 in credit in your account. You have to use it within a month. Also, you can get some products for free for a period of 12 months. There are also free tiers for certain products where you never get changed at that low tier. For example, there is a free tier for the Web App.

Logging In

To log in to Azure got to https://portal.microsoft.com.

You have a customizable dashboard you can work with. Similar to Windows Start, you have a list on the left and a series of tiles on the right. You can add and remove tiles to suit the way you work.

Create a Virtual Machine

You will want to create a virtual machine. Go to the dashboard. Click New at the top left-hand side. Click Compute. See All. You can scroll down and click on the blue Windows Server tile to all of the different versions in a list on the right-hand side. Scott Duggy chose Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter. You have a number of questions to answer, that are in the following four categories.

1. Basics
2. Size
3. Settings
4. Summary

Basics

• Name – give it a name that’s unique across your Azure account
• VM disk type – SSD or HDD
• User name –
• Password –
• Confirm Password –
• Subscription – Pay-As-You_Go or Free
• Resource group – Create new or Use existing
• Enter a unique name in the text box provided
• Location – drop-down of several world-wide geographic locations – not all services offered in every region
• Save Money – if you have extra Windows license already – say No if unsure

Size

There are many options here. Pick one. The highest cost is thousands of dollars per month. You have specifications that include the CPU, RAM, disks, IOPS (input output operations per second) and others.

Settings

High Availability. Storage. Network. Extensions. Auto-Shutdown. Availability set is concerned with separating servers geographically in case of desaster. With managed storaged accounts it might be more or less expensive. By default, when we create a VM< we get a virtual betwork created in the resource group. We get a slash 24 network That is a full 255 IP address network. You cannot use them all, however, becaasue a few are reserved. You will need a public IP address if you want to be able to access this server from the Internet. You also have a firewall. If you are just testing, you will want to shut it down at a certain time to save money.

You can save the settings in a template.