From AWS Foundations to Microsoft Azure: My First Hands-on Azure Project (Part 1)

Introduction

After earning multiple AWS certifications, I decided to expand my cloud engineering experience by exploring Microsoft Azure.

While cloud concepts like compute, storage, networking, and identity are consistent across providers, each platform has its own architecture, terminology, and way of organizing resources.

Rather than just reading documentation, I wanted to gain hands-on experience in Azure by building real infrastructure.

This project marks the beginning of my Azure journey and the first part of my multi-cloud learning series.

Why I Started Exploring Azure

Coming from an AWS background, I was already familiar with core cloud principles like:

• Virtual machines (EC2 equivalents)
• Object storage (S3 equivalents)
• Networking concepts (VPC equivalents)
• Identity and access management

However, I wanted to understand:

How are these concepts implemented differently in Microsoft Azure?

This curiosity led me to start building directly in Azure instead of only studying it.

Project Objective

The goal of this project was to:

• Understand Azure’s resource organization model

• Learn how the Azure Portal works

• Gain familiarity with core services like:
  Resource Groups
  Virtual Machines
  Networking basics

• Build confidence navigating a new cloud environment

What I Learned

This project helped me understand Azure from a practical perspective.

Key areas explored:

• Resource Groups as a way of organizing infrastructure

• Virtual Machines and how compute is provisioned
• Basic networking concepts in Azure
• How Azure structures and manages cloud resources

One interesting realization was how familiar cloud concepts are implemented differently across providers.

Even though AWS and Azure solve the same problems, their structure and naming conventions differ significantly.

Key Insight (Multi-Cloud Perspective)

One of the most valuable takeaways was recognizing patterns across clouds.

For example:

AWS EC2 ↔ Azure Virtual Machines
AWS S3 ↔ Azure Blob Storage (within Azure Storage Accounts)

AWS VPC ↔ Azure Virtual Networks
AWS IAM ↔ Azure Active Directory (Entra ID)

This reinforced an important idea:

Cloud engineering is less about memorizing services and more about understanding underlying patterns.

Challenges Faced

1. Getting comfortable with Azure’s structure

Azure’s organization model felt different from AWS at first, especially with Resource Groups acting as a central organizing layer.

How I adapted:
I focused on understanding Resource Groups as the foundation of everything in Azure, which made navigation much easier.

1. Terminology differences

Even when services do the same thing, Azure and AWS use different names.

How I handled it:
I mapped equivalent services between AWS and Azure to build mental connections between both platforms.

Repository

GitHub:
https://github.com/JoySmarty/3mtt-first-azure-project

What’s Next

After getting comfortable with Azure fundamentals, I wanted to go deeper into automation.

The next step was learning how to deploy infrastructure using code instead of the Azure Portal.

That led me to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using ARM Templates, covered in Part 2.

Final Thoughts

This project wasn’t about learning cloud computing from scratch—it was about expanding my perspective beyond AWS.

Understanding Azure helped me strengthen my multi-cloud thinking and improved how I approach cloud architecture in general.