Microsoft Azure: Setup and First Steps

Cloud Computing Cloud Computing 8 min read 1675 words Beginner ExcellentWiki Editorial Team

Microsoft Azure is the second-largest cloud platform with approximately 24% market share (Synergy Research Group, Q1 2025) and the default choice for organizations deeply embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem. Its native integration with Active Directory, Office 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and Visual Studio makes it the most natural cloud platform for enterprise Windows workloads. Azure also offers unique hybrid capabilities through Azure Arc, which extends Azure management to on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud environments.

Creating an Azure Subscription

Start at azure.microsoft.com and sign up for a free account. Azure provides $200 in credits valid for 30 days plus 12 months of free services including 750 hours of Windows or Linux B1s VMs, 100 GB of storage, and 250 GB of SQL Database. Unlike AWS and GCP, Azure organizes billing around subscriptions — each subscription is a billing and access boundary, and organizations typically use multiple subscriptions for different environments or departments.

Install the Azure CLI and authenticate:

az login
az account set --subscription "Pay-As-You-Go"
az account show

Resource Groups

Every Azure resource must belong to exactly one resource group. Resource groups are logical containers for related resources that share the same lifecycle — when you delete a resource group, all resources within it are deleted. This design makes environment cleanup straightforward and enables role-based access control at the group level.

az group create --name excellentwiki-rg --location eastus

# Create resources within the group
az vm create --resource-group excellentwiki-rg --name app-vm --image UbuntuLTS --admin-username azureuser

Organize resource groups by environment (app-dev-rg, app-staging-rg, app-prod-rg) or by workload (frontend-rg, backend-rg, data-rg), depending on your operational model. Azure Policy can enforce mandatory tags and region constraints at the subscription or resource group level.

Azure Virtual Machines

Azure VMs support both Windows Server (2022, 2025) and Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, SUSE) images. The VM series includes B-series (burstable, low-cost), D-series (general-purpose), E-series (memory-optimized), and NC/ND-series (GPU-accelerated for AI workloads).

Azure distinguishes itself with Azure Hybrid Benefit — customers with existing Windows Server or SQL Server licenses through Software Assurance can use those licenses in Azure at no additional cost, reducing VM cost by up to 40% compared to pay-as-you-go.

az vm create \
  --resource-group excellentwiki-rg \
  --name web-vm \
  --image Ubuntu2204 \
  --size Standard_B2s \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --generate-ssh-keys \
  --public-ip-sku Standard \
  --nsg-rule HTTP \
  --custom-data cloud-init.txt

Azure supports Virtual Machine Scale Sets for auto-scaling groups of identical VMs with load balancer integration, rolling upgrades, and automatic OS patching.

App Service: Managed Web Applications

Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for web applications, REST APIs, and mobile backends. It supports .NET, Java, Python, Node.js, PHP, and Docker containers. App Service handles security patching, load balancing, auto-scaling, and TLS termination automatically.

App Service Plans define the compute resources — Linux and Windows plans are available across Basic, Standard, Premium, and Isolated tiers. The Premium tier includes private endpoint connectivity, enhanced scaling, and access to daily backups.

az webapp create \
  --resource-group excellentwiki-rg \
  --plan excellentwiki-plan \
  --name excellentwiki-app \
  --runtime "PYTHON:3.12" \
  --sku B1

az webapp deployment source config-zip \
  --resource-group excellentwiki-rg \
  --name excellentwiki-app \
  --src app-release.zip

Azure Active Directory (Entra ID)

Azure Active Directory, now rebranded as Microsoft Entra ID, is the cloud identity and access management service. It provides single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, conditional access policies, and identity protection. Entra ID integrates natively with Office 365, Dynamics 365, and thousands of SaaS applications.

Key Entra ID features:

Conditional Access — evaluate user, device, location, and risk signals before granting access
Privileged Identity Management (PIM) — just-in-time privileged role activation with approval workflows
Managed Identities — automatically managed service principals in Entra ID for Azure resources, eliminating credential management

Entra ID supports external identities (Azure AD B2B) for collaborating with partners and customers.

Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is Microsoft’s end-to-end DevOps platform covering Boards (agile project management), Repos (Git repositories), Pipelines (CI/CD), Test Plans (manual and exploratory testing), and Artifacts (package feeds).

YAML-based pipelines define build, test, and deployment stages. Azure Pipelines supports multi-platform builds (Linux, macOS, Windows) with parallel job execution. Integration with GitHub, Docker Hub, and Kubernetes is built in.

trigger:
  branches:
    include:
    - main

pool:
  vmImage: ubuntu-latest

variables:
  azureSubscription: 'excellentwiki-service-connection'

stages:
- stage: Build
  jobs:
  - job: BuildApp
    steps:
    - task: UsePythonVersion@0
      inputs:
        versionSpec: '3.12'
    - script: pip install -r requirements.txt
    - script: pytest --junitxml=test-results.xml

- stage: Deploy
  condition: succeeded()
  jobs:
  - deployment: DeployToAppService
    environment: production
    strategy:
      runOnce:
        deploy:
          steps:
          - task: AzureWebApp@1
            inputs:
              azureSubscription: '$(azureSubscription)'
              appName: 'excellentwiki-app'
              package: '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/**/*.zip'

Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database based on SQL Server. It includes built-in high availability (99.99% SLA), automatic backups with point-in-time restore, geo-replication, and elastic scaling via the serverless compute tier.

The Hyperscale service tier supports up to 100 TB of data with rapid scale-out of read replicas. Azure SQL also integrates with Microsoft Purview for data governance and classification.

az sql server create \
  --name excellentwiki-db \
  --resource-group excellentwiki-rg \
  --admin-user dbadmin \
  --admin-password $(openssl rand -base64 20)

az sql db create \
  --resource-group excellentwiki-rg \
  --server excellentwiki-db \
  --name excellentwiki \
  --service-objective S2

Azure Networking

Azure Virtual Network (VNet) is the fundamental networking building block. Unlike AWS VPCs which are region-scoped, Azure VNets can be connected across regions via VNet Peering, and multiple VNets can be linked through Azure Virtual WAN for hub-and-spoke topologies. Azure Load Balancer distributes traffic at Layer 4, Azure Application Gateway provides Layer 7 routing with WAF capabilities, and Azure Traffic Manager handles global DNS-based traffic routing.

Azure DDoS Protection Standard, integrated with VNets, provides always-on traffic monitoring and automatic mitigation of volumetric attacks. Network Security Groups (NSGs) act as distributed firewalls at the subnet or NIC level, supporting both allow and deny rules with priority ordering. Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-native network security service with built-in high availability and auto-scaling, providing centralized policy management across VNets and subscriptions.

az network vnet create \
  --resource-group excellentwiki-rg \
  --name excellentwiki-vnet \
  --address-prefix 10.0.0.0/16 \
  --subnet-name web-subnet \
  --subnet-prefix 10.0.1.0/24

az network vnet subnet create \
  --resource-group excellentwiki-rg \
  --vnet-name excellentwiki-vnet \
  --name db-subnet \
  --address-prefix 10.0.2.0/24 \
  --service-endpoints Microsoft.Sql

az network nsg rule create \
  --resource-group excellentwiki-rg \
  --nsg-name web-nsg \
  --name AllowHTTP \
  --priority 100 \
  --destination-port-ranges 80 443

Azure Functions

Azure Functions provides serverless event-driven compute with support for HTTP triggers, timer triggers, blob storage events, queue messages, and Cosmos DB change feeds. The consumption plan charges only for execution time (per-second billing), while the Premium plan eliminates cold starts with always-warm instances and provides VNET integration for private network connectivity. Durable Functions extend Azure Functions with stateful orchestration, checkpointing, and replay for complex workflows.

[FunctionName("ProcessOrder")]
public static async Task<IActionResult> Run(
    [HttpTrigger(AuthorizationLevel.Function, "post")] HttpRequest req,
    [CosmosDB(databaseName: "orders", collectionName: "items", ConnectionStringSetting = "CosmosDBConnection")] IAsyncCollector<object> orders,
    ILogger log)
{
    string requestBody = await new StreamReader(req.Body).ReadToEndAsync();
    var order = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Order>(requestBody);
    await orders.AddAsync(order);
    return new OkObjectResult($"Order {order.Id} processed.");
---

FAQ

How does Azure pricing differ from AWS? Azure uses per-minute billing (AWS uses per-hour for most services). Azure Reservations require a 1 or 3 year commitment for up to 72% discount. Azure Hybrid Benefit allows existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses to reduce costs significantly.

What is Azure Arc? Azure Arc extends Azure management to any infrastructure — on-premises, edge, multi-cloud. You can apply Azure Policy, deploy Azure Kubernetes Service clusters, and run Azure data services (SQL Managed Instance, PostgreSQL Hyperscale) on non-Azure infrastructure.

Is Azure best for .NET applications? Yes. Azure provides first-class support for .NET with App Service, Azure Functions (C#), Azure SQL Database (SQL Server), Visual Studio integration, and GitHub Actions. Azure’s .NET 8 and .NET 9 runtimes are updated within hours of Microsoft releases.

How do I secure an Azure subscription? Use Azure Policy for governance (allowed regions, required tags, allowed resource types), Microsoft Defender for Cloud for threat detection, Entra ID Conditional Access for identity protection, and Azure RBAC for granular permissions. Enable diagnostic settings to send activity logs to Log Analytics.

Can I use Azure without Microsoft products? Yes. Azure fully supports Linux VMs, open-source databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB), Java, Python, Node.js, Go, and Docker. Approximately 60% of Azure VMs run Linux (Microsoft, 2025). Azure also provides first-class support for Kubernetes via AKS, Terraform for infrastructure as code, and HashiCorp Vault integration for secrets management.

What storage options does Azure offer? Azure Blob Storage (object storage, similar to S3), Azure Managed Disks (block storage for VMs), Azure Files (SMB file shares), and Azure NetApp Files (enterprise NFS). Azure Blob has hot, cool, cold, and archive tiers with lifecycle management for automatic tier transitions.

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