Azure Management Tasks Part 1: How to Prepare Your Environment.

What is Azure Management?

Azure management refers to the tasks and processes required to maintain your business applications and the resources that support them - not just in Azure, but across other clouds and on-premises environments too. Think of it as a lifecycle. Every resource you create goes through stages: it's deployed, it runs and gets maintained, and eventually it's retired. Azure management covers all of that, from start to finish.

You can't practice managing cloud resources if you don't have any resources to manage. So before diving into monitoring, governance, or security in Azure, the first job is simple: build something. In this walkthrough, we'll stand up a small but complete environment: a resource group to hold everything, a virtual network for connectivity, a Linux virtual machine to act as our compute workload, and a storage account. Nothing fancy, just enough real infrastructure to give the later management work something to actually apply to.

Before You Start

You'll want:

• A working Azure account with an active subscription.
• Rough familiarity with what a VM, VNet, and storage account are (you don't need deep expertise yet).
• A few minutes to click through the Azure portal.

One small piece of advice: if your subscription already has other resources sitting in it, jot down what they are. It'll save you from accidentally tearing down something important later on.

Step 1: Create a resource group

Everything we build needs a home, and in Azure that home is a resource group - a logical container that groups related resources together so they're easier to manage, and easier to delete all at once when you're done.

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

Step 2: 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.
• 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.

Step 3: 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.
• 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.
• Confirm the password for the admin account.
• 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.
• Select Create to confirm the resource cost and create the virtual machine.
• Select Home to return to the Azure portal home page.

Step 4: Create a Storage account

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

What You've Got Now

At this point, your subscription contains a small but functioning environment: one resource group holding a virtual network, a virtual machine, and a storage account. It's not meant to be production-grade. It's a sandbox, purpose-built so that the next parts of this series have something real to work with.

From here, the natural next step is to go deeper into the network configuration we glossed over - subnets, address spaces, and security rules - which is exactly where we'll pick up next.

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