Azure Portal Insightful Resources [Handy Guide]

Azure is a cloud platform that provides the computing, storage, and networking resources needed to build cloud-hosted applications. As a new user, the Azure portal is likely to be the primary way you will interact with Azure. The Azure portal lets you create and manage all your Azure resources and Azure services.

What is the Azure Portal?

Azure portal is the essential primary tool that we use commonly in our day-to-day management and work activities. The Azure portal is a public website that you can access with any web browser. Once you sign in with your Azure account, you can create, manage, and monitor any available Azure services.

You can identify a service you’re looking for, get links for help on a topic, and deploy, manage, and delete resources. It also guides you through complex administrative tasks using wizards and tooltips.

Azure Portal is an interface through which users can access and control all of their applications in place — including web apps, databases, virtual machines, virtual networks, storage, and Visual Studio team projects. It is versatile and uses the Azure portal’s graphical experience or the integrated command-line experience provided by Cloud Shell.

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The Azure portal is located at https://portal.azure.com. With an Azure account, we can sign into the Azure portal. The portal is a web-based administration site that lets you interact with all of your subscriptions and resources you have created. With the help of just one interface, you can view and do a spectrum of things.

 Image Source: https://portal.azure.com

Azure Portal

The Azure portal is the primary graphical user interface (GUI) for controlling Microsoft Azure. We can use it as a Dashboard. It is the best interface for carrying out a single task if you want to look at the configuration options in detail.

The column on the left is called a hub; it shows you a core set of options. The dashboard view provides high-level details about your Azure environment. You can customize the Dashboard by moving and resizing tiles, and displaying services you’re interested in.

 Image Source: https://portal.azure.com

Read: Microsoft Azure Interview Questions

Resource Panel

In the left-hand sidebar of the portal is the resource panel, which lists the main resource types. The resources listed are part of your favorites.

The default (main) page is Home, but you can change your default view to the customizable Dashboard from Settings.

Azure Portal offers a large range of services, and the Azure portal user interface (UI) reflects this scope. The sliding pane approach allows you to navigate back and forth through the various administrative tasks with ease. 

Azure Portal Supported Devices

The Azure portal is a web-based Azure console and runs in the browser of all modern desktops and tablet devices. You can access the portal by having JavaScript enabled on your browser.

If you need to control Azure resources from your cell phones use the Azure mobile app. It’s available for iOS and Android.

Azure Portal Browsers Compatibility 

Azure portal is compatible with these below-listed browsers which are the most up-to-date browsers and also compatible with your operating system:

1. Microsoft Edge (latest version)
2. Internet Explorer 11
3. Safari (latest version, Mac only)
4. Chrome (latest version)
5. Firefox (latest version)

Azure Portal has several types of services that we can use as per the basis of our requirements.

Below image shows the listed all Azure portal services:

Image Source: https://portal.azure.com

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Azure Portal services

You can benefit from the insights given about the Azure portal services. With these services, we can solve the real-time business problems, and adopt them easily to use in our daily work activities.

How to Automate your Business Processes with Azure Portal Service

Microsoft Azure portal provides various ways to host and execute code or workflows without using Virtual Machines (VMs). 

These include Azure Functions, Microsoft Power Automate, Azure Logic Apps, and Azure WebJobs. 

Modern businesses run on multiple applications and services. In today’s world, everything depends on the data, how we can streamline the flow of data for our business, and make it more automotive

Choosing the right technology for these critical data integrations and process automation should be prioritized.

In business, we see high-quality products that involve multiple steps, people, and software packages.

Each of these processes runs in a simple line of activities that workers perform one after the other or they may branch or loop. Each process may also run quickly or take days or weeks to complete.

Business processes modeled in the software are often called workflows. 

Azure includes four different technologies that you can use to build and implement workflows that integrate multiple systems:

1. Logic Apps
2. Microsoft Power Automate
3. WebJobs
4. Azure Functions

Logic Apps

• Logic Apps is a service within Azure that you can use to automate, orchestrate, and join different components of a distributed application. 
• The design-first approach in Logic Apps, you can draw out complex workflows that model complex business processes.

Microsoft Power Automate

• Microsoft Power Automate is a service that you can use to create workflows.
• We can create workflows that join and orchestrate many different components by using the website or the Microsoft Power Automate mobile app.

WebJobs

• Azure app service is a cloud-based hosting service for web-based application and 
• RESTful APIs (Application Programming Interface) that we can use to run a program or script automatically. 
• There are two kinds of WebJob: Continuous and Triggered are types of Web jobs.

Azure Functions

• An Azure Function is a simple way to run small pieces of code in the cloud.
• Azure Function supports multiple languages. You can write the Function in C#, Java, JavaScript, PowerShell, Python.
• To create an Azure Function, we can choose from the range of templates in the Azure portal, below list is an example of the templates.

1. HTTPTrigge: This template can be used for the code to execute in response to a request sent through the HTTP protocol.
2. TimerTrigger: This template is used when we want the code to execute according to a particular schedule time.
3. BlobTrigger: This template is used when we need the code to execute when a new blob is added to an Azure Storage account.
4. CosmosDBTrigger: This template is used when we want the code to execute in response to new or updated documents in a NoSQL database.

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Create a Bot with QnA Maker and Azure Bot Service using Azure Portal

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Bots are a common way to provide help through multiple communication channels. With the help of the QnA Maker service and Azure Bot Service, we can create a chatbot.

Conversational AI

• Conversational AI publishes support information and answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) that can be accessed through a web browser or dedicated mobile app. 
• Sometimes it’s challenging to get the answers for specific questions. With the help of Azure portal QnA services we can train and publish the model and create knowledgebase articles, and also consume it in your applications. We can automate them as well.
• More organizations are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that make use of AI agents, commonly known as bots to provide a first-line of automated support, with a full range of channels that we can also communicate. 
• Bots are designed to interact with users conversationally.
• QnA Maker: It is a cognitive service that enables you to create and publish a knowledge base with built-in natural language processing capabilities.
• Azure Bot Service: It is a service that provides a framework for developing, publishing, and managing bots on Azure.

Read: How to make chatbot in Python?

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using the Azure Portal

1. Using AKS, we can quickly deploy a production-ready Kubernetes cluster in Azure. 
2. Makes it simple to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure. 
3. Reduces the complexity and operational overhead of managing Kubernetes by offloading much of that responsibility to Azure.
4. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that quickly deploys and manages clusters. 
5. A multi-container application that includes a web front end and a Redis instance is run in the cluster. 
6. Monitor the health of the cluster and pods that run your application.

Connecting IoT devices to Cognitive Services using Azure Functions with Azure Portal

1. Create and deploy an Azure function to make a language translation (IoT device). 
2. The function will use the Cognitive Speech Service. 
3. Your device will record a voice in a foreign language and convert the speech to a target language.
4. Configure an IoT device to an IoT Hub.
5. Integrate Cognitive Speech Service into an Azure function.
6. Deploy and Test Azure function app with an IoT device.
7. Cognitive Service provides the capability as an API for real-time speech translation and configures its API key in Azure Function.

• Speech API: It allows you to access Cognitive Services and add real-time speech translations to your app.
• Speech API key: It’s a unique identifier used to authenticate your app with the API.
• Speech API endpoint: It is a base URL that associates with the network address of API service.

Azure HDInsight

Azure HDInsight provides the  technologies listed below: 

1. Ingest
2. Process
3. Analyze big data
4. Supports batch processing, data warehousing, IoT, and data science.

Essential Features of Azure HD Insights using Azure Portal

• Hadoop:  Apache Hive, HBase, Spark, and Kafka. Hadoop stores data in a file system. Spark stores data in memory. 
• HBase is a NoSQL database built on Hadoop. It’s generally used for search engines. HBase offers automatic failover.
• Storm is a distributed, real-time streamlining analytics solution.
• Kafka is an open-source platform that’s used to compose data pipelines. It introduces message queue functionality, which allows users to publish or subscribe to real-time data streams.

Azure Data Services using Azure Portal

Databrick

1. Databricks is a serverless platform that’s optimized for Azure.
2. It provides one-click setup, streamlined workflows, and an interactive workspace for Spark-based applications.
3. Databricks unites capabilities to Apache Spark, including fully trained Spark clusters and an interactive workspace. 
4. You can use REST APIs to program clusters.
5. We can use R, Python, Scala, and SQL programming languages.

Data Factory

1. Data Factory is a cloud-integration service.
2. It organizes the movement of data between various data stores.
3. We can automate data movement and data transformation.
4. Use Data Factory to create and schedule data-driven workflows (called pipelines) that can ingest data from data stores.
5. Data Factory processes and reconstructs data by using compute services such as Azure HDInsight, Hadoop, Spark, and Azure Machine Learning. 

In Azure Portal, Can We Connect All Services Combined?

Yes, we can create applications with the design of various components: 

Website front-end, back-end services, and trigger functions that perform compute-on-demand services.

Azure Portal also includes various communication strategies to let these multiple components pass data to each other, these communication services to create scalable, dynamic solutions out of testable components.

Why is the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Roadmap Framework Impactful in Application Development?

• It helps you balance speed and provides innovation.
• Can be controlled by using an agile approach to start with a minimally viable solution. (MVS)

Types of Azure Console

• Single Unified Azure Console
• Azure Serial Console 
• Serial console for windows
• Serial console for Linux

What is the Single Unified Azure Console?

1. Azure console is a Single easy-to-use console not only accessible for you but for your team and your projects as well. 
2. This unified hub significantly simplifies building, deploying, and managing your cloud resources.
3. Azure console resizes tiles to show just the right amount of detail and share insights across apps and resources.

What is Azure Serial Console?

1. The Serial Console in the Azure portal provides access to a text-based console for virtual machines (VMs)
2. Virtual machine scale set instances running either Linux or Windows.
3. The serial Azure console can only be accessed by using the Azure portal and is allowed only for those users who have an access role of Contributor or higher to the VM or virtual machine scale set.
4. Serial Console works in the same manner for VMs and virtual machine scale set instances.

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