Introduction to Microsoft Azure

Introduction to Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure grew from a cloud application platform announced in 2008 into a broad public cloud for infrastructure, applications, data, integration, security, and AI. Resources are controlled through Azure Resource Manager and accessed through the portal, CLI, PowerShell, SDKs, REST APIs, and declarative templates.

Core ideas

• A Microsoft Entra tenant is an identity boundary; a subscription is a billing, quota, and management boundary.
• Resource groups collect related resources for lifecycle, access, policy, and deployment.
• Regions contain data centers, and supported Regions can provide physically separated Availability Zones.
• Management groups organize subscriptions so Azure Policy and access governance can inherit.

Design and operating model

Establish a tenant and management-group hierarchy, separate production and non-production subscriptions, apply policy and budgets, then deploy landing-zone networking and shared services. Select Regions from service availability, data residency, latency, resilience, and cost requirements.

Example

az account show --output table
az account list-locations \
  --query '[].{Name:name,DisplayName:displayName}' \
  --output table
az group create \
  --name learning-rg \
  --location centralindia

Run examples in a disposable training subscription. Replace names, Regions, identifiers, scopes, sizes, and policies with reviewed values, and confirm current Azure CLI and service requirements before production use.

Production guidance

• Protect privileged identities with MFA, Conditional Access, and just-in-time elevation.
• Use consistent tags and resource naming, but do not encode secrets or mutable facts in names.
• Deploy through Bicep, ARM templates, or Terraform so environments can be reviewed and reproduced.

The chapter quiz follows the lesson and checks both service vocabulary and architecture decisions.