How to Prepare Your Azure Environment for Management and Administration Tasks

Introduction

Before managing cloud resources in Microsoft Azure, it's important to become familiar with the tools used for administration and automation.

Azure provides several management interfaces, including the Azure Portal, Azure Cloud Shell, Azure CLI, and Azure PowerShell, allowing administrators to manage resources efficiently from both graphical and command-line environments.

In this guide, we'll prepare an Azure environment for management and administration tasks while exploring the core tools used by Azure administrators and cloud engineers.

By the end of this tutorial, you'll know how to:

• Navigate the Azure Portal
• Create and manage Azure resources

Let's prepare our Azure environment for cloud administration.

What is Azure Management?

Azure Management refers to the tools and services used to deploy, organize, monitor, and maintain resources in Microsoft Azure.

Common Azure management tools include:

• Azure Portal
• Azure Cloud Shell
• Azure CLI
• Azure PowerShell

These tools help administrators perform everyday cloud management and automation tasks.

Scenario

A company is preparing to migrate workloads and services into Microsoft Azure.

Before deploying production resources, the cloud administration team needs to familiarize themselves with Azure management tools and establish a working environment for resource administration.

The team must be able to create resources and understand the different tools available for managing Azure environments.

In this lab, we will prepare an Azure environment and explore the core management tools used by Azure administrators and cloud engineers.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, ensure you have:

• A Microsoft Azure account
• An active Azure subscription
• A stable internet connection
• Access to the Azure Portal

Now come with me, let's prepare our Azure environment for administration tasks.

Create a resource group

In order to make clean-up easy at the end, start with creating a new resource group to hold the resources for this guided project. Using resource groups to organize things is a quick way to ensure you can manage resources when a project is over.

1. From the Azure portal home page, in the search box, enter resource groups.
2. Select Resource groups under services.
3. Select Create.
4. Enter guided-project-rg in the Resource group name field.
5. The Region field will automatically populate. Leave the default value.
6. Select Review + create.
7. Select Create.
8. Return to the home page of the Azure portal by selecting Home.

Create a virtual network with one subnet

1. From the Azure portal home page, in the search box, enter virtual networks.
2. Select virtual networks under services.
3. Select Create.
4. Scroll down to the Instance details section and enter guided-project-vnet for the Virtual network name.
5. Select Review + create.
6. Select Create.
7. Wait for the screen to refresh and show Your deployment is complete.
8. Select Home to return to the Azure portal home page.

Create a virtual machine

1. From the Azure portal home page, in the search box, enter virtual machines.
2. Select virtual machines under services.
3. Select Create and then select Virtual machine.
4. Select guided-project-rg for the Resource group.
5. Enter guided-project-vm for the Virtual machine name.
6. For the Image, select one of the Ubuntu Server options. (For example, Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS - x64 Gen2)
7. Continue further on the Basics page to the Administrator account section.
8. Select Password for authentication type.
9. Enter guided-project-admin for the admin Username.
10. Enter a password for the admin account.
11. Confirm the password for the admin account.
12. Leave the rest of the settings as default settings. You can review the settings if you like, but shouldn’t change any.
13. Select Review + create.
14. Select Create to confirm the resource cost and create the virtual machine.
15. Select Home to return to the Azure portal home page.

Create a Storage account

1. From the Azure portal home page, in the search box, enter storage accounts.
2. Select Storage accounts under services.
3. Select Create.
4. Scroll down to the Instance details section and enter a name for the storage account. Storage accounts must be globally unique, so you may have to try a few different times to get a storage account name.
5. Select Review + create.
6. Select Create.
7. Wait for the screen to refresh and show Your deployment is complete.
8. Select Home to return to the Azure portal home page.

Conclusion

Congratulations on successfully preparing your Azure environment for management and administration tasks.

In this lab, we explored the core tools used to manage Azure resources i.e Azure Portal.

These tools form the foundation of Azure administration and are essential for deploying, configuring, automating, and managing cloud resources effectively.

By completing this exercise, you have taken another important step in building practical Azure administration and cloud engineering skills.

See you in the next article.