Microsoft Azure For Dummies

Introduction

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud service in which you rent compute services from Microsoft that run in Microsoft’s data centers. You pay only for the resources you use over the course of your billing period.

Microsoft Azure For Dummies is intended to provide you with a gentle yet thorough introduction to Microsoft Azure. In this updated second edition, I cover the must-know features you are likely to encounter as you begin the Azure journey. I show you how things work and why it makes sense to use specific features. Undoubtedly, cloud computing can be complex at first, but it also has the potential to save you or your organization money, time, and effort.

About This Book

Many books on Microsoft Azure have been published, yet most cover laser-focused areas: analytics, security, machine learning, systems administration, app development, and so on. And certification texts generally cover just enough to pass a focused exam and are not a general reference on all core Azure capabilities. With the constant feature rollouts in the Azure platform, it can be hard to keep up, which is why in this edition of Microsoft Azure For Dummies, I cover the new features and those that have undergone drastic change since the first edition of this book was published in 2019.

I’ve worked with Azure for close to a decade. Here’s a bit of a secret: Whether you are the most experienced Azure Cloud Engineer or just starting out, you’ll experience some technical challenges every now and then. Even Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) find it labor-intensive to stay current with the constant changes introduced by the Azure product management team.

Thus, I wrote this book with the intention of helping you with the following:

Becoming comfortable with Microsoft Azure: I give you this comfort by sticking to what Microsoft calls the 80 percent scenarios, or Azure deployments used by 80 percent of its customer base.

Gaining skill with programmatic deployment: Along the way, I show you how to use Azure PowerShell, Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI), and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to get your Azure work done. These Azure access methods change less frequently than the Azure portal graphical user interface (GUI).

Becoming comfortable with tools and staying current: You can expect the Azure portal to change such that what you see on your screen may not match what’s in this book. Why is that? Because no two Azure users deploy the same resources or configure their user experience the same way. So don’t be alarmed! I updated both chapters in Part 6 of the book (The Part of Tens) to help you plan for the future of Azure and how to optimize your environment.

In addition, I include many web addresses throughout this book. If Microsoft changes a page address and the link I provide no longer works, don’t fret! Simply run a Google search for the article title and you’ll find the updated page address nearly instantly.

Throughout this book, you’ll also find dozens of step-by-step procedures. I want you to keep the following points in mind as you work through them:

You need an Azure subscription to follow the steps. If you haven’t already done so, you can create a free Azure account (https://azure.microsoft.com/free) that gives you 30 days to spend $200 USD on any Azure service. This quota should get you through this book’s material as long as you delete your deployments when you finish using them.

I often provide sample values that work in my environment but may not be supported in yours based on geography and resources utilized. You should customize these procedures to suit your requirements.

You’ll likely need a few additional tools along the way. All of these tools are available from the Microsoft website as Azure utilities.

Finally, most of the Azure administration and development tools discussed are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. (I’m using a Windows 10 or 11 Enterprise workstation.)

Foolish Assumptions

I wrote this book with several types of readers in mind. See whether you can place yourself roughly or exactly in any of the following descriptions:

You’re an experienced IT professional who may or may not already be using Azure for future initiatives at work.

You might be preparing for an Azure certification.

You’re an IT newcomer who wants to know Azure to future-proof your career.

You’re proficient in other public cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, and you want to see how Azure compares.

You need a quick reference, not a hundred Azure books, to lead you in the right direction for business and technical success.

Regardless of your present attitude and orientation toward Azure, I hope that by studying this book and applying its methods you become more knowledgeable about Azure and thereby excel in your profession.

Icons Used in This Book

If you’ve read a For Dummies book before, then you’re probably familiar with the icons. If not, or if you want a formal description of each, then read on!

Tip The Tip icon marks tips (duh!) and shortcuts that you can use to make working with Azure easier.

Remember Remember icons mark especially important information. To siphon off the most important information in each chapter, skim the paragraphs that have these icons.

Technical Stuff The Technical Stuff icon marks information of a highly technical nature. You’ll be digging into the weeds a bit more. You can skip if you like, though!

Warning The Warning icon tells you to watch out! It marks important information that may save you headaches.

On the web When you see the On the Web icon, it points to valuable Azure-related websites. Most of these URLs direct you to more detailed information on the Microsoft website.

Beyond the Book

Beyond what’s included between the covers of this book, I created a Cheat Sheet that includes tips, tricks, and shortcuts for the Azure services you use over the course of the book. You can find the Cheat Sheet and other information related to this book (such as errata) by visiting https://www.dummies.com and searching for Azure For Dummies in the search box.

Where to Go from Here

Although I’d read this book in order starting with Chapter 1, you may not prefer to use that method. You can dip into any chapter with no formal dependency on those that come before it, so flip to the chapter that you want to begin with and let’s get to work!

Part 1

Getting Started with Microsoft Azure

IN THIS PART …

Figuring out exactly what cloud computing means and how Microsoft Azure fits into the cloud computing picture

Differentiating the different cloud computing deployment and service delivery models

Exploring the Azure Subscription Models

Understanding the basics of Azure Resource Manager and Azure Regions

Gaining familiarity with the Microsoft Azure script and UI-based administrative tools

Chapter 1

Introducing Microsoft Azure

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Introducing the cloud

Bullet Differentiating among the cloud computing models

Bullet Introducing the major Microsoft Azure services

Bullet Starting your Azure subscription

Bullet Learning how Azure deploys product updates

Welcome to cloud computing, and welcome to Microsoft Azure! I’m not sure what occurred in your professional or personal life to lead you to read this book, but I’m glad you’re here with me. In this chapter, I cover ground-level terminology, beginning with precisely what buzzwords the cloud and cloud computing mean.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll have your very own Azure subscription running at the free tier. Are you excited? I hope so!

What Is Cloud Computing?

Ask one hundred people to define cloud computing and I am confident the responses may make you laugh, cry, or think a bit. You see, many people at first think cloud technology is anything but shared compute capacity and resources using a common interface.

Most people use cloud services whether they’re aware of doing so or not. Think of your smartphone. Where do you think your photos, media, files, and settings are being backed up? What is behind your ability to retrieve your content wherever you are in the world, provided you have an internet connection?

Do you use a web-hosting company to host your personal website? Where is the physical server that houses your website? How about accessing that digital video service or music heard over the Internet?

These scenarios are examples of cloud computing, in which you simply rent resources on another organization’s infrastructure.

The resources you rent consist of the following hardware and software components:

Compute:Compute is raw computing power — the central processing unit (CPU) and random-access memory (RAM) that form the platform for applications and data.

Storage:Persistent storage means you have a place on Microsoft’s servers to store your files and other data. When you save a file to a cloud-hosted storage account, the file should remain in place forever, or at least until you move or delete it.

Network: Azure provides a software-defined network infrastructure on which you can host your virtual machines and other Azure services. Because the cloud almost always involves an internet connection, online and cloud are essentially synonymous. I say almost always because a business can create a private cloud that shares most attributes of a public cloud but is local to its private network environment. Microsoft also sells a private, portable version of Azure called Azure Stack.

Analytics: You’ll never get to touch the cloud provider’s compute, storage, or network resources. The closest you’ll get is viewing its telemetry data in your web browser or from a management app. Thus, Azure and other public cloud providers give you tools to see precisely how much of their services you consume each minute. Cloud analytics also gives you valuable troubleshooting and performance-tuning advice for your cloud infrastructure.

Businesses are interested in using the cloud because it allows them to offload a lot of what’s scary, annoying, and/or expensive about maintaining an on-premises data center, such as the following:

Power: It’s potentially very expensive to provide electricity to all the equipment necessary to host your applications and services. And what happens if your on-campus data center experiences a utilities outage? When you move your data into the cloud, your provider takes on the risk of these issues.

Capital expenditure: When you run an on-premises data center, you either rent your physical servers or purchase them outright. As such, you’re responsible for all hardware upgrades and repairs. All that hardware can be expensive, too.

Security and configuration overhead: If you can’t afford local systems administrators, or if your existing resources are stretched thin, it can be too easy to leave a vulnerability in place on an on-premises server that can be compromised by bad actors. By contrast, when you use a public cloud service like Azure, you rely upon Microsoft’s human and machine learning–based threat intelligence to help keep your applications, services, and data safe.

Do you see the trend here? Cloud computing is popular because it’s convenient for the end user and cheaper for the enterprise business. Before I go any further, however, I want to codify what I mean by cloud computing.

NIST definition

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, pronounced nihst), a research laboratory in the United States, developed the standard definition of cloud computing. According to NIST, the five essential characteristics of cloud computing are

On-demand self-service: Cloud customers can provision services at any time and are charged only for the resources they consume.

Broad network access: Cloud services are ordinarily offered globally, and the customer is encouraged to place services as geographically near its consumers as possible.

Resource pooling: Cloud services are multitenant, which means that different customers’ environments are isolated. You should never, ever see another Azure customer’s data, and vice versa.

Rapid elasticity: A cloud services customer can accommodate variable traffic patterns by configuring their services to scale accordingly. For instance, you can configure Azure to automatically duplicate your web servers to accommodate traffic spikes and then remove servers automatically when they are no longer needed.

Measured service: The cloud offers services on demand, which are metered; once again, customers pay only provisioned resources.

On the web If you want to read the source material, check NIST Special Publication 800-145, The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, which you can download from https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-145/final.

Cloud computing benefits

As I mention earlier in this chapter, cloud computing is attractive to both businesses and consumers because of its convenience, high availability, and potential cost savings. Whereas organizations had to once buy expensive hardware with limited capacity, also known as a capital expenditure (CapEx), Microsoft Azure uses a consumption-based spending model that’s classified as an operational expenditure (OpEx).

So why is OpEx so attractive? The fairly predictable, recurring cost model of OpEx is appealing to cost-conscious organizations. (And which organization isn’t cost-conscious nowadays?)

The cloud’s rapid scalability and elasticity are capabilities that only the largest companies in the world can afford to manage on their own. Microsoft Azure enables smaller companies and individuals to replicate an SQL database between geographical regions with a couple of mouse clicks. (See Figure 1-1.) Making high availability this accessible to customers is an enormous benefit of cloud computing.

FIGURE 1-1: In Azure, you can ensure that a virtual machine includes disaster recovery in one or several locations around the world with only a couple of clicks.

Economies of scale

The term economies of scale means that a business that purchases its internal resources at a larger volume can pass along savings to its customers.

Technical Stuff OTHER CLOUD PROVIDERS

For completeness, I want you to know that although this book’s focus is Microsoft Azure, other major public cloud providers also take advantage of economies of scale. These public cloud providers include, but aren’t limited to, the following:

Alibaba Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

IBM Cloud

Oracle Cloud

Salesforce

At this writing, Microsoft has its Azure product portfolio spread across 78 regions worldwide. Within each region are two or more physical data centers. Each data center has untold numbers of server racks, blade servers, storage arrays, routers, switches, and so forth — an immense physical capacity. To further elaborate, while there may be 78 regions worldwide, several regions such as the United States might have many physical data centers. Because there are over 200 physical data centers with compute capacity globally, businesses can be assured their data has a home. I think we can reasonably assume that Microsoft gets a discount from the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) because it purchases in such huge volume. Microsoft’s purchase discounts means that the company in turn extends the savings to its Azure customers. It’s as simple as that.

Understanding Cloud Computing Models

The working definition of cloud computing is a subscription arrangement under which a person or business rents a cloud service provider’s infrastructure and pays only for the services consumed. That definition is fine. In this section, however, I want to sharpen your general understanding of cloud computing by explaining the deployment and service delivery models.

Deployment models

In Azure nomenclature, deployment refers to your provisioning resources in the Azure public cloud. You may be saying, What’s this? Why is Microsoft Azure called a public cloud? I thought you said that different Azure customers can never see each other’s resources by default. Hang on; hang on. Let me explain.

Public cloud

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud because its global data center fabric is accessible by the general public. Microsoft takes Azure’s multitenant nature very seriously; therefore, it adds layer after layer of physical and logical security to ensure that each customer’s data is private. In fact, in many cases, even Microsoft doesn’t have access to customers’ data encryption keys!

Other major cloud service providers — including AWS and GCP (see the sidebar "Other cloud providers") — are also considered to be public cloud platforms.

Technical Stuff Microsoft has three additional, separate Azure clouds for exclusive governmental use and restricted country usage. You might read Microsoft literature that contains references to Azure Cloud, which refers to its public cloud, and to Azure Government Cloud, which refers to its sovereign, special-access clouds for the U.S. government. No member of the general public can access an Azure Government Cloud without being associated with a government body. The same is true with other country-specific sovereign clouds such as China and Germany. If you are interested in learning more about Azure Government Cloud, including a list of resellers, go to https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/azure-government/documentation-government-csp-list.

Private cloud

As I mention earlier, very, very few businesses have enough financial, capital, and human resources to host their own cloud environments. Typically only the largest enterprise organizations can afford having their own private cloud infrastructure with redundant data centers, storage, networking, and compute, but they may have security prohibitions against storing data in Microsoft’s (or any other cloud provider’s) physical data centers. Example organizations include financial institutions and healthcare organizations.

Microsoft has two private cloud options, and the one you choose is often dictated by your security needs. For those who no longer want to deal with a hardware footprint, a Microsoft Azure customer can create a dedicated hosting environment whereby computing resources are exclusively owned and managed by a single enterprise. Accessing such computing resources requires the use of a private internal network. Because you are asking Microsoft for dedicated capacity, the costs are understandably higher. That said, most organizations needing dedicated capacity utilize this private cloud offering. Microsoft sells a portable version of the Azure cloud, Azure Stack, which consists of a server rack that a company leases or purchases from a Microsoft-affiliated hardware or service provider. The idea is that you can bring the hallmarks of cloud computing — on-demand self-service, resource pooling, elasticity, and so forth — to your local environment without involving either the Internet or an external cloud provider, unless you want to.

Your administrators and developers use the same Azure Resource Manager (ARM) application programming interface (API) to deploy resources locally to Azure Stack as they use to deploy to the Azure public cloud. This API makes it a snap to bring cloud-based services on premises, and vice versa. ARM is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2.

Hybrid cloud

When you combine the best of on-premises and cloud environments, you have a hybrid cloud. If you are part of any enterprise organization, I can almost guarantee you that some facet of the business operates in a hybrid cloud. Why am I so certain of this? A hybrid cloud allows the business to salvage (read: continue to use) the on-premises infrastructure that it’s already paid for while leveraging the hyper scale of the Azure public cloud. It often takes time to transition from a legacy system to a cloud infrastructure.

Take a look at Figure 1-2. In this topology, the on-premises network is extended to a virtual network running in Azure. You can do all sorts of nifty service management here, including

Joining the Azure virtual machines (VMs) to your local Active Directory domain.

Managing your on-premises servers by using Azure management tools.

Providing nearly instant failover disaster recovery (DR) by using Azure as a DR site. Failover refers to having a replicated backup of your production servers available somewhere else so that you can shift from your failed primary environment to your backup environment within minutes. Failover is critical for businesses that cannot afford the downtime involved in restoring backups from a backup archive.

By the end of this book, you’ll understand how to deploy the environment you see in Figure 1-2, but here’s an overview of what’s going on:

On the left side is a local business network that connects to the Internet via a virtual private network (VPN) gateway.

On the right (Azure) side is a three-VM deployment in a virtual network. A site-to-site VPN connects the local environment to the virtual network. Finally, an Azure load balancer spreads incoming traffic equally among the three identically configured web servers in the web tier subnet. As a result, the company’s internal staff can access the Azure-based web application over a secure VPN tunnel and get a low-latency, reliable, always-on connection to boot.

FIGURE 1-2: A hybrid cloud in which the on-premises corporate network extends to Azure.

Remember In this book, I refer to a local, physical network environment as an on-premises environment. In the wild, you’ll see stray references to on premise— sadly, even in Microsoft’s Azure documentation. Don’t make this mistake. A premise is an idea; premises refers to a location.

Service delivery models

Organizations deploy applications in three primary ways: Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

An SaaS application is a finished, customer-facing application that runs in the cloud. Microsoft Office 365 is a perfect example. As shown in Figure 1-3, you can use Word Online to create, edit, and share documents with only a web browser; an internet connection; and an Office 365 subscription, which you pay for each month on a subscription basis.

With SaaS applications, you have zero visibility into the back-end mechanics of the application. In the case of Word Online, you neither know nor care how often the back-end servers are backed up, where the Office 365 data centers are geographically located, and so forth. All you care about is whether you can get to your cloud-hosted documents and whether Word Online behaves as you expect.

FIGURE 1-3: Microsoft Word Online, part of the Microsoft Office 365 product family, is an example of an SaaS application.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Consider a business that runs a three-tier on-premises web application with VMs. The organization wants to move this application workload to Azure to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing. Because the organization has always done business by using VMs, it assumes that the workload must by definition run in VMs in Azure.

Not so fast. Suppose that the workload consisted of a Microsoft-stack application. Maybe the business should consider using PaaS products such as Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database to leverage autoscale and pushbutton georeplication.

Remember I discuss both Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database in Part 3. For now, understand that georeplication means placing synchronized copies of your service in other geographic regions for fault tolerance and placing those services closer to your users.

Or maybe the workload is an open-source project that uses PHP and MySQL. No problem. Azure App Service can handle that scenario. Microsoft also has a native hosted database platform for MySQL called (appropriately enough) Azure Database for MySQL.

With PaaS, Microsoft takes much more responsibility for the hosting environment. You’re not 100 percent responsible for your VMs because PaaS products abstract all that plumbing and administrative overhead away from you. Sounds dreamy, right? The goal is to develop the best application without focusing on the system administration overhead.

The idea is that PaaS products free you to focus on your applications and, ultimately, on the people who use those applications. If PaaS has a trade-off, it’s that relinquishing full-stack control is an adjustment for many old-salt systems and network administrators.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Most businesses that migrate their applications and services to Azure use the IaaS model at first, if only because they’ve delivered their services via VMs in the past — the old if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it approach.

In large part, IaaS is where the customer host one or more VMs in a cloud. The customers remain responsible for the full lifecycle of the VM, including

Configuration

Data protection

Performance tuning

Security

By hosting your VMs in Azure rather than in your on-premises environment, you save money because you don’t have to provision the physical and logical resources locally. You also don’t have to pay for the layers of geographic, physical, and logical redundancy included in Azure out of the box.

Thus, whereas SaaS is a service that’s been fully abstracted in the cloud and the customer simply uses the application, IaaS offers a split between Microsoft’s responsibility (providing the hosting platform) and the customer’s responsibility (maintaining the VMs over their lifecycles).

Tip To sum up the major distinction between IaaS and PaaS, IaaS gives you full control of the environment but you sacrifice scalability and agility. PaaS gives you full scalability and agility, but you sacrifice some control. To be sure, the cloud computing literature contains references to other cloud deployment models, such as community cloud. You’ll also see references to additional delivery models, such as Storage as a Service (STaaS) and Identity as a Service (IDaaS). This chapter focuses on the most commonly used cloud deployment and delivery models.

Warning Cloud computing in general, and Microsoft Azure in particular, uses what’s called the shared responsibility model. In this model, Microsoft’s responsibility is providing the tools you need to make your cloud deployments successful — Microsoft’s data centers, the server, storage and networking hardware, and so on. Your responsibility is to use those tools to secure, optimize, and protect your deployments. Microsoft isn’t going to configure, back up, and secure your VMs automatically; those tasks are your responsibility.

Introducing Microsoft Azure Services

The Microsoft Azure service catalog has hundreds of services. In fact, the number of services increase on a rolling basis, generally quarterly, and the list is constantly evolving. Microsoft maintains a services directory at https://azure.microsoft.com/services, but in this chapter, I give you a high-level tour of what Microsoft calls 80 percent services — the Azure products that 80 percent of the customer base uses.

Azure history

In October 2008, Microsoft announced Windows Azure at its Professional Developers Conference. Many people feel that this product was a direct answer to Amazon, which had already begun unveiling AWS to the general public.

The first Azure-hosted service was SQL Azure Relational Database, announced in March 2009. Then came support for PaaS websites and IaaS virtual machines in June 2012. Figure 1-4 shows what the Windows Azure portal looked like during that time.

Satya Nadella became Microsoft’s chief operating officer in February 2014. Satya had a vision of Microsoft expanding its formerly proprietary borders, so Windows Azure became Microsoft Azure, and the Azure platform began to embrace open-source technologies and companies that Microsoft formerly considered to be hostile competitors.

Tip Microsoft Azure provides first-class support for Linux-based VMs and non-Microsoft web applications and services, which is a huge deal. Did you ever expect Microsoft to promote another vendor’s products besides its own? I surely didn’t once upon a time.

Finally, Microsoft introduced the RM deployment model at Microsoft Build 2014. The API behind Windows Azure was called Azure Service Management (ASM), and it suffered from several design and architectural pain points. ASM made it super-difficult to organize deployment resources, for example, and it was impossible to scope administrative access granularly. So changes were bound to come from Azure’s Product Development team.

FIGURE 1-4: The Windows Azure portal, circa 2012.

The ARM API is modeled closely on the AWS API (you know the old saying Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery), with core architectural concepts such as resource groups and role-based access controls that were direct analogs of features in the AWS cloud.

To support old customers with old deployments, ARM still offers limited support for ASM deployments in the Azure portal (see Chapter 2). These resources are tagged with the suffix Classic. This book is committed to the ARM API, however, and because few organizations still utilize these services, I won’t be addressing ASM IaaS products.

Azure Virtual Machines is Microsoft Azure’s meat and potatoes IaaS product. Specifically, the Azure Marketplace in the Azure portal lists thousands of preconfigured VM images from Microsoft, endorsed Linux distributions, and third-party solution providers. You can see the gallery of VM images in Figure 1-5.

You can migrate your on-premises physical and virtual machines to Azure, of course, as well as create custom VM images. I get to those topics in time; I promise.

FIGURE 1-5: The Azure Marketplace includes prebuilt Windows and Linux VM images.

PaaS products

The Azure product portfolio is filled with powerful, cost-saving PaaS offerings. The following are some of the more high-profile Azure PaaS products:

App Service: Web Apps, Mobile Apps, API Apps, Logic Apps, and Function Apps

Databases: Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Azure Database for MySQL, and Azure Cache for Redis

Containers: Azure Container Instances, Azure Container Registry, and Azure Kubernetes Service

DevOps: Azure DevOps and Azure DevTest Labs

Internet of Things (IoT): Azure IoT Hub, Azure IoT Edge, Azure Sphere, and Azure Digital Twins

Machine learning: Azure Machine Learning Service, Azure Bot Service, Cognitive Services, and Azure Search

Identity: Azure Active Directory (AD), Azure AD Business-to-Business, and Azure AD Business-to-Consumer

Monitoring: Application Insights, Azure Monitor, and Azure Log Analytics

Migration: Azure Site Recovery, Azure Cost Management, Azure Database Migration Service, and Azure Migrate

Remember Microsoft Database solutions are not IaaS products; they are PaaS products. Why? Because Microsoft is handling the infrastructure, your focus can be on building innovative data-centric solutions.

Starting Your First Azure Subscription

You can have a free, low-obligation trial of the Microsoft