Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 - Module Two

This article is the second module of the Azure Az-900 course, and we will learn about the following.

• What are Azure and its services
• Using Azure Cloud Shell to launch configure your virtual machine to run a basic web server
• Scale up your server to give you more compute power

What is Azure

Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform. Azure is a continually expanding set of cloud services, that helps your organization meet your current and future business challenges. Azure gives you the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.

Azure services

Microsoft categorizes Azure cloud services into more than 18 main product types, let's take so a look at the most used categories -

Compute

Networking

Storage

Mobile

Databases

Web

Internet of Things

Artificial Intelligence

Machine Learning is a data science technique that allows computers to use existing data to forecast future behaviors, outcomes, and trends. Using machine learning, computers learn without being explicitly programmed.

DevOps

Create a virtual machine using Cloud Shell

The first step is to open your Azure account (it can be the free one); then click on the button as below.

A new Azure Cloud shell windows appear in the bottom of your Azure page, please switch from Powershell to Bash by selecting Bash as below,

Create a resource group

The first step is to create a resource group to hold all the things that we need to create. This allows us to administer all the VMs, disks, network interfaces, and other elements that make up our solution a unit.

And in this article, we will use the Azure CLI to create a resource group with the az group create command. It takes a --name to give it a unique name in our subscription, and a --location to tell Azure what area of the world we want the resources to be located by default.

So, let’s create a resource group by running the below command.

az group create --name myFirstResourceGroup --location

Do not forget to change local using one of the following lists.

'Centralus, eastasia, southeastasia, eastus, eastus2, westus, westus2, northcentralus, southcentralus, westcentralus, northeurope, westeurope, japaneast, japanwest, brazilsouth, australiasoutheast, australiaeast, westindia, southindia, centralindia, canadacentral, canadaeast,u ksouth, ukwest, koreacentral, koreasouth, francecentral, southafricawest’

Create a virtual machine

Let's get our Windows VM up and running.

Run the following az vm create command to create your VM. (use the same location as the group location in the previous step).

When the VM is ready, you see information about it. Here's an example.

Add a web server

Step 1 Configure IIS

From Cloud Shell, run this az vm extension set command to download and execute a PowerShell script that installs IIS and configures a basic home page.

Step 2

az vm open-port --port 80 --resource-group myFirstResourceGroup --name myVM

Verify the configuration

Run this az vm show command to get your VM's public IP address.

az vm show -d -g myFirstResourceGroup -n myVM --query publicIps -o tsv

In a new browser tab, navigate to your VM's IP address (http:// followed by the IP address). You'll see your welcome message and your VM's name.

Scale up

What is scale?

Scale refers to adding network bandwidth, memory, storage, or compute power to achieve better performance.

In this example, we will increase our VM's size to Standard_DS3_v2.

Run az vm show to verify that your VM is running the new size.

You see your new VM size,

Summary

In this module, we have learned about Microsoft Azure and how it relates to cloud computing, and we have used Azure Cloud Shell to configure a new virtual machine to run a basic web server.