As if today marks the anniversary of Microsoft Azure and its 12th Birthday! (1st February 2022) Anyway, we are going to cover the networking models within Microsoft Azure and some of the management options for Azure. So far we have only used the Azure portal but we have mentioned other areas that can be used to drive and create our resources within the platform.
We also have Virtual Network Peering. This enables virtual networks across tenants and regions to be connected using the Azure backbone. Not transitive but can be enabled via Azure Firewall in the hub virtual network. Using a gateway transit allows peered virtual networks to the connectivity of the connected network and an example of this could ExpressRoute to On-Premises.
The ASGs can then be used in rules that are part of Network Security Groups to control the flow of communication and can still use NSG features like service tags.
Microsoft Azure has two separate load balancing solutions. (the first party, there are third parties available in the Azure marketplace.) Both can operate with externally facing or internally facing endpoints.
We have spent most of our theory time walking through the Azure Portal, I would suggest that when it comes to following a DevOps culture and process a lot of these tasks, especially around provisioning will be done via an API or a command-line tool. I wanted to touch on some of those other management tools that we have available to us as we need to know this for when we are automating the provisioning of our Azure environments.
The Microsoft Azure Portal is a web-based console, that provides an alternative to command-line tools. You can manage your subscriptions within the Azure Portal. Build, Manage, and Monitor everything from a simple web app to complex cloud deployments. Another thing you will find within the portal are these breadcrumbs, JSON as mentioned before is the underpinning of all Azure Resources, It might be that you start in the Portal to understand the features, services and functionality but then later understand the JSON underneath to incorporate into your automated workflows.
Before we get into Azure PowerShell it is worth introducing PowerShell first. PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework, a command-line shell and a scripting language. We might and dare I say this liken this to what we have covered in the Linux section around shell scripting. PowerShell was very much first found on Windows OS but it is now cross-platform.
Then if we wanted to find some specific commands associated with Azure VMs we can run the following command. You could spend hours learning and understanding more about this PowerShell programming language.
There are some great quickstarts from Microsoft on getting started and provisioning services from PowerShell [here](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azure/get-started-azureps?view=azps-7.1.0)
You will see below that there are lots of integrations and tools built into Visual Studio Code that you can use to interact with Microsoft Azure and the services within.
Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, authenticated, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources. It provides the flexibility of choosing the shell experience that best suits the way you work.
When you select to use the cloud shell it is spinning up a machine, these machines are temporary but your files are persisted in two ways; through a disk image and a mounted file share.
Finally, I want to cover the Azure CLI, The Azure CLI can be installed on Windows, Linux and macOS. Once installed you can type `az` followed by other commands to create, update, delete and view Azure resources.
I would love some feedback from the community on this as well. But the way I see it is that Azure PowerShell is a module added to Windows PowerShell or PowerShell Core (Also available on other OS but not all) Whereas Azure CLI is a cross-platform command-line program that connects to Azure and executes those commands.
You saw previously that I have the Azure PowerShell module installed on my system but then I also have the Azure CLI installed that can be called through PowerShell on my Windows machine.
The takeaway here as we already mentioned is about choosing the right tool. Azure runs on automation. Every action you take inside the portal translates somewhere to code being executed to read, create, modify, or delete resources.
Azure CLI
- Cross-platform command-line interface, installable on Windows, macOS, Linux
