Creating and viewing resources
As you
make selections, the portal scrolls to the right. The separate sections that
get opened are called blades.
Click New
in the main hub. You see a categorized list of the resources available, as
shown in Figure 1-5. This is a new blade.
If
you click See All, it will take you to the Azure Marketplace. The Marketplace
contains all of the resources that you can use in Azure. This includes
everything from VM images, which are certified before being made available, all
of the SQL Server options, and Web Apps. It also includes applications such as
Drupal and WordPress. To add any resource, you can search for it, then select
it to add it to your Azure subscription.
You
can also select a category on this blade. It will show the list of resources
valid for that category, and you can then select which one you want to create.
For example, to create a VM, you would click the Virtual Machines category; to create
a storage account or a SQL Server, you would click Data + Storage.
Once you
have created some resources, there are several ways to view them. Let’s look
back in the main hub (Figure 1-1), which has two helpful options—Resource
Groups and All Resources.
View by
resource group
Use this
option to see all of your resources by resource group. Click Resource Groups,
and you see a blade like
Figure 1-6 showing all of your resource
groups.
Figure 1-6
Screenshot showing all of your resource groups in the Azure portal.
Next, select one of the resource groups, and it
shows all of the resources deployed to that group (Figure 1-7).
Figure
1-7 List of resources in the selected resource group.
You can
click any of the resources here, and they will be displayed in a new blade.
Click All Settings to show the Settings blade
(Figure 1-8). From there, you can look at the costs by resource, view the
deployment history of the resources, set tags and locks, and manage what users
have access to this resource group
Figure 1-8
Settings blade when looking at resources in a resource group.
This is
where you can use RBAC to control access to all of the resources in the same
resource group at one time by assigning roles to users. The user has to be set
up in the Azure AD, which is done in the classic Azure portal
(https://manage.windowsazure.com).
Let’s give VM Contributor access to another user
account. This is granting the ability to manage the VMs but not the ability to
manage the access.
to the
VMs. So this new user could not grant access to anybody else. If you want
someone to have full administrative privileges of all the resources in the
resource group, you can grant that user the Owner role.
In the
Users blade, click Add. You are prompted to select the role you want the user
to have (Figure 1-9).
Figure 1-9
Select a role to assign to a new user.
Look through the list and find the Virtual Machine
Contributor role and select it. The Add Access blade highlights Add Users and
shows a list of users to the right from which to select (Figure 1-10). Select
an account and then click Select at the bottom of the blade.
Figure
1-10 Select a user to add.
Next,
click OK on the Add Access blade. It returns to the Users screen, which now reflects
the user(s) added and their roles (Figure 1-11).
Figure 1-11 List of users and their assigned roles.
I added the Virtual Machine Contributor role for
Michael Collier. This means that Michael Collier now has the ability to manage
the VMs in that resource group.
View by
resource
Back in the main hub (Figure 1-1), let’s look at the
other view of our resources. Click All Resources. This shows exactly what you
expect—a list of all your resources (Figure 1-12). You can edit the columns by
selecting Columns. I’ve added the Type column because I can never remember what
all of the icons mean.
Clicking
any resource brings up a blade for that specific resource.