Stop 18 · Cloud & HostingTopics · 11/11

Azure (Overview)

In short

Plenty of large companies already use Microsoft for email, logins and office work, so their cloud is often Azure. If you join one, knowing the basics saves your first week.

Microsoft's cloud platform — a major alternative to AWS and GCP, particularly common in enterprises already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem.

The purple blob taps an office ID card at a canteen counter and receives a lunch tray.

Think of it like this

The office canteen card

In a big office, one ID card opens the door, logs in your laptop and pays at the canteen. Nobody signs up separately for lunch. Azure feels like that for companies already on Microsoft: the same work login and admin rules reach their cloud servers too.

Watch it happen

How Azure organises things

Entra ID tenant

Subscription

rg-shop-prod

App Service

Azure SQL

Blob Storage

1/4Everything starts at the tenant: your organisation's Microsoft Entra ID, which holds users and logins.

The big ideas

What you need to know

Entra ID for identity

Formerly Azure Active Directory. People sign in with work accounts, and apps can use managed identities instead of stored passwords.

App Service

A PaaS for web apps and APIs. Push code or a container and it handles servers, scaling and TLS.

Blob Storage

Azure's object storage, like S3. Containers hold blobs, and SAS tokens give time-limited access.

Resource groups

Group everything for one app and environment. Deleting the group removes every resource inside it.

See it in code

Walk through the code

bash

1az login2az group create --name rg-shop-dev --location centralindia3 4# Create a Linux App Service plan and a Node 22 web app5az appservice plan create -g rg-shop-dev -n plan-shop --is-linux --sku F16az webapp create -g rg-shop-dev -p plan-shop -n shop-api-dev \7  --runtime "NODE:22-lts"8 9# Set config and deploy a zip of your built app10az webapp config appsettings set -g rg-shop-dev -n shop-api-dev \11  --settings APP_ENV=dev12az webapp deploy -g rg-shop-dev -n shop-api-dev --src-path app.zip --type zip13 14# Done? Delete everything in one go15az group delete --name rg-shop-dev --yes

1/4Create a resource group in the Central India region (Pune).

Web app names must be unique across Azure, so pick your own. F1 is the free tier; run az webapp list-runtimes to see current runtime names.

Save yourself the pain

Common mistakes

Oops

Creating resources scattered across random resource groups.

Do this instead

Use one group per app and environment, named like rg-app-env. Cleanup and access control become one step.

Oops

Assuming 'container' in Blob Storage means a Docker container.

Do this instead

There, a container is just a bucket-like grouping of blobs. Same word, different meaning, so read the docs carefully.

Your mission

Hello from Azure

~35 min

Quick check

You want to remove every resource from a finished experiment in Azure in one step. What helps most?

Go deeper

1Read Azure's rough equivalents to AWS services you already know (EC2 → Virtual Machines, S3 → Blob Storage).
2Understand Azure's strong integration with enterprise tools like Active Directory.
3Recognize you don't need deep expertise in all three clouds — pick one to go deep on based on the jobs you're targeting.