DEV Community

Cover image for Day 01 — Azure CLI Basics
Ipadeola Taiwo
Ipadeola Taiwo

Posted on

Day 01 — Azure CLI Basics

#azure #beginners #cli #devjournal

Welcome to Day 1 of my 90-day cloud engineering challenge! I'm documenting everything I learn as I go — partly to hold myself accountable, and partly because writing things down helps them actually stick.

Today's focus: getting comfortable with the Azure CLI and creating my first resource entirely from the terminal.

What I Learned
The Azure CLI is a command-line tool that lets you manage Azure resources directly from your terminal, without needing to click through the Azure Portal. Once it's installed and you're logged in, you can create, update, and delete resources with simple commands — which is faster and more repeatable than navigating a UI.

Commands I Ran

  1. Install CLI: For me i am on window so i am using below command 
winget install --id Microsoft.AzureCLI
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  1. Check the installed version 
az --version
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

This confirmed the CLI was installed correctly and showed me the version, dependencies, and Python environment it's running on. Good first sanity check before doing anything else.

  1. Log in to Azure 
az login
az account show
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

This opens a browser-based login flow and connects the CLI to my Azure account. Once logged in,

az
confirms which subscription and tenant is currently active — useful for double-checking you're working in the right environment before creating anything.

  1. Create my first Resource Group 
az group create --name taiwo-devops-rg --location eastus
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Output:

{
  "id": "/subscriptions/<subscription-id>/resourceGroups/taiwo-devops-rg",
  "location": "eastus",
  "managedBy": null,
  "name": "taiwo-devops-rg",
  "properties": {
    "provisioningState": "Succeeded"
  },
  "tags": null,
  "type": "Microsoft.Resources/resourceGroups"
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

A Resource Group is basically a container that holds related Azure resources — useful for organizing and managing things together (and for cleaning everything up at once later by just deleting the group).

What This Taught Me
This exercise taught me how to create a resource group and control exactly where it lives (in this case, eastus). More importantly, it showed me how much faster the CLI can be compared to the Azure Portal — no waiting on pages to load, no risk of losing your place if your internet connection hiccups. Just a clean command and a clean output. I can already see why CLI/scripting skills matter so much in DevOps and cloud engineering.

Problems I Faced
Honestly, the biggest challenge today was just remembering the command syntax — this is my first real session using the Azure CLI, so nothing is muscle memory yet. But I expect that to improve quickly with repetition. The more I run these commands, the more naturally they'll come.

Why This Matters in DevOps
This might look like a small win — installing a CLI and creating one resource group — but it ties directly into how real DevOps workflows operate:

  • Automation over manual clicks: DevOps is built on repeatable, scriptable processes. A command like az group create can be dropped into a CI/CD pipeline, a shell script, or an Infrastructure-as-Code workflow — something you simply can't do with portal clicks.
  • Consistency: Running the same command always produces the same result. That predictability is exactly what you want when provisioning environments for dev, staging, and production.
  • Foundation for IaC: Tools like Terraform, Bicep, and ARM templates all build on the same underlying concepts I practiced today — resource groups, regions, and subscriptions. Getting comfortable with the CLI now makes those tools click faster later.
  • Faster feedback loops: Typing a command and getting an immediate JSON response is a much quicker feedback loop than navigating multiple portal pages, which matters when you're iterating quickly or troubleshooting under time pressure.

In short: today wasn't just about "I made a resource group." It was about building the muscle memory and mindset that DevOps engineers rely on every day — treating infrastructure as something you script and version, not something you click through.

What's Next
This is Day 1 of 90. Tomorrow I'll be building on this foundation — likely exploring more az commands and starting to provision some actual resources inside this resource group.

Follow along with the rest of the series as I document 90 days of hands-on cloud engineering learning.

_#Azure #CloudEngineering #DevOps #100DaysOfCloud #LearningInPublic

Top comments (0)