Mastering Azure Management: (Part 1)

Welcome to the first post in our series on mastering Microsoft Azure management. This series is built around a practical, guided project inspired by Microsoft.
We are going to move beyond theory and dive deep into a practical, guided project inspired by the official Microsoft Learn path: Introduction to Microsoft Azure Management tasks.

This learning path is designed to give you a solid foundation in managing core Azure resources. Over the next few clicks, we will confidently deploy, configure, and manage virtual networks, virtual machines, and storage accounts. As the official documentation states, "You'll have the opportunity to learn about managing virtual machines, virtual networks, and storage accounts, and then a guided project will give you hands-on experience actually managing Azure resources."

Part 1: Preparing Your Azure Environment

Our goal today is to create a resource group, a virtual network (VNet), a virtual machine (VM), and a storage account. This collection of resources will serve as our sandbox for all the management tasks to come.

Prerequisites
Before we begin, ensure you have the following:

• An active Microsoft Azure subscription. If you don't have one, you can sign up for a free account, which typically includes credits to get you started. The official path also notes, "Choose the Azure account that's right for you. Pay as you go or try Azure free for up to 30 days".

Note: In my screenshots, you will see the resource group may17rg — feel free to use your own unique name!

Task 1: Log in and Create a Resource Group
Everything in Azure starts with a resource group. It is a logical container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. Think of it as a folder on your computer where you organize all the files for a specific project.

1. Navigate to the Azure portal (portal.azure.com).
2. Search for "Resource groups" and select + Create.
3. Name your resource group something like guided-project-rg. To make things easy and clean next, choose your preferred region and click Review + create. Note from my resource group name, I already had a resource group, so it's not the name above.

Task 2: Deploy a Virtual Network (VNet)

Azure Virtual Network (VNet) is the fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. It enables many types of Azure resources, such as VMs, to securely communicate with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks.

1. From the Azure portal home page, search for and select Virtual networks.
2. Select + Create.
3. Under Instance details, ensure your resource group is selected and name your VNet guided-project-vnet. Leave the other settings as defaults for now and click Review + create.

Task 3: Provision a Virtual Machine (VM)

virtual machine. VMs are one of the most common Azure services, providing on-demand, scalable computing resources. We will be using a Linux VM for this project.

1. Search for and select Virtual machines.
2. Click + Create and then Virtual machine.
3. Under Instance details, select your resource group and name the VM guided-project-vm.
4. For the Image, select Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS - x64 Gen2.
5. Under Administrator account, choose Password as the authentication type. Enter a username and a strong password (make sure you remember it!).
6. Leave the rest of the settings as defaults and click Review + create.

Task 4: Create a Storage Account

Finally, we need a storage account. This service provides a unique namespace in Azure, entirely lowercase and containing no hyphens/special characters for your data, storing everything from blobs (like files and images) to tables and queues.

1. Search for and select Storage accounts.
2. Click + Create.
3. Choose your resource group.
4. Enter a Storage account name. This name must be globally unique across all of Azure, so you may need to try a few variations (e.g., guidedprojectstorage123).
5. Leave all other settings at their defaults and click Review + create.

Conclusion and Next Steps
Congratulations! We have successfully set up the foundational Azure resources that form the core of our project environment. You performed the first crucial steps: creating a logical container, a secure network, a compute resource, and a storage account.
In the next part of this series, we will dive into the real management work. We'll update our virtual network configuration by creating a new subnet to support additional infrastructure requirements. Stay tuned for Part 2, where the real administration begins!

This series follows the Microsoft Learn path: Introduction to Microsoft Azure Management tasks.