Louis Oodo

Posted on Mar 15

Setting Up Your Azure Environment: A Guided Project Walkthrough

#tutorial #cloud #azure #devchallenge

Setting Up Your Azure Environment: A Guided Project Walkthrough

Introduction

Getting started with cloud infrastructure can feel overwhelming, but the Azure Portal makes it manageable through a structured UI. In this guide, we will walk through the essential steps to provision a Resource Group, a Virtual Network, a Virtual Machine, and a Storage Account. By following this sequence, you will ensure your environment is organized and easy to manage from start to finish.

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.

From the Azure portal home page, in the search box, enter resource groups.
Select Resource groups under services.

Important: Take note of other resource groups that are already created. During clean up, you want to avoid deleting resource groups that were already here. Pay special attention for a resource group called NetworkWatcherRG. If it doesn’t already exist, the NetworkWatcherRG will be created during this guided project and should be deleted at the end. However, if the NetworkWatcherRG already exists prior to starting this project, you should NOT delete it at the end. It may be helpful to take a screenshot of resource groups that exist before you create the group for the guided project.

Select Create.

Note: Your subscription should already be selected. If you have multiple Azure subscriptions associated with this login, select the one you’d like to use for the guided project.

Enter guided-project-rg in the Resource group name field.

The Region field will automatically populate. Leave the default value. Unfortunately the East US would not allow me create a Virtual Machine as there were no availability so I had to use Korea central.
Select Review + create.
Select Create.
Return to the home page of the Azure portal by selecting Home.

Create a Virtual Network with One Subnet

From the Azure portal home page, in the search box, enter virtual networks.
Select virtual networks under services.
Select Create.

Note: The subscription and resource group should automatically fill in. Verify that the information filled in matches the correct subscription and the new resource group created for the guided project (guided-project-rg if you’re following along with the naming conventions).

Scroll down to the Instance details section and enter guided-project-vnet for the Virtual network name.
Select Review + create.
Select Create.
Wait for the screen to refresh and show Your deployment is complete.
Select Home to return to the Azure portal home page.

Create a Virtual Machine

From the Azure portal home page, in the search box, enter virtual machines.
Select virtual machines under services.
Select Create and then select Virtual machine.

Note: The subscription should automatically fill in. Verify that the information filled in matches the correct subscription.

Select guided-project-rg for the Resource group.
Enter guided-project-vm for the Virtual machine name.
For the Image, select one of the Ubuntu Server options (For example, Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS - x64 Gen2).
Continue further on the Basics page to the Administrator account section.
Select Password for authentication type.
Enter guided-project-admin for the admin Username.
Enter a password for the admin account and confirm it.
Leave the rest of the settings as default settings. You can review the settings if you like, but shouldn’t change any.
Select Review + create.
!Review + create](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/edwgkwek9f0ygts1j2ck.png)

Note: Once validation has passed, you’ll receive a cost estimate of how much it will cost per hour to run the VM.

Select Create to confirm the resource cost and create the virtual machine.
Select Home to return to the Azure portal home page.

Create a Storage Account

From the Azure portal home page, in the search box, enter storage accounts.
Select Storage accounts under services.
Select Create.

Note: The subscription and resource group should automatically fill in. Verify that the information filled in matches the correct subscription and the new resource group created for the guided project.

Scroll down to the Instance details section and enter a name for the storage account. > Note: Storage accounts must be globally unique, so you may have to try a few different times to get a storage account name.
Select Review + create.
Select Create.
Wait for the screen to refresh and show Your deployment is complete.
Select Home to return to the Azure portal home page.

Conclusion

By following these steps, you have successfully deployed a foundational set of resources in Azure. You now have a dedicated Resource Group containing a Virtual Network, a Linux-based Virtual Machine, and a Storage Account. Organizing your work this way not only provides a clean environment for your project but also ensures that when you are finished, you can easily remove the resource group to prevent unnecessary costs.

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