Create Your First VM with Azure Cloud In different ways

To create your first server/VM on Azure cloud, you have different ways to do that :-

• Azure Resource Manager
• Azure PowerShell
• Azure CLI
• Azure REST API
• Azure Client SDK
• Azure VM Extensions
• Azure Automation Services

The Azure portal is the easiest way to create resources such as VMs, i will describe each one of them,

The first way which is The Portal here, to do this it’s very simple :-

• Click on the Create a resource option in the top-left corner of the portal page.

• Use the Search the Marketplace search bar to find “Ubuntu Server” for example.

• Press on Create , then new page will be open.

• Configure the VM, by enter the name, the region, The Subscription,Availability options
• There are several other tabs you can explore to see the settings you can influence during the VM creation. Once you’re finished exploring, click Review + create to review and validate the settings.
• On the review screen, Azure will validate your settings. You might need to supply some additional information based on the requirements of the image creator.

This is was the first way to create the VM which is consider the easiet one also.

Azure Resource Manager

assumig you want to create a copy of a VM with the same settings. You could create a VM image, upload it to Azure, and reference it as the basis for your new VM,Azure provides you with the option to create a template from which to create an exact copy of a VM.

You can do this, after create the VM –> Setting –> export template.

Azure PowerShell

Azure PowerShell is ideal for one-off interactive tasks and/or the automation of repeated tasks, note that PowerShell is a cross-platform shell that provides services like the shell window and command parsing.

New-AzVm  -ResourceGroupName "TestResourceGroup"  -Name "test-wp1-eus-vm"  -Location "East US"  -VirtualNetworkName "test-wp1-eus-network"  -SubnetName "default"  -SecurityGroupName "test-wp1-eus-nsg"  -PublicIpAddressName "test-wp1-eus-pubip"  -OpenPorts 80,3389

Azure CLI

The Azure CLI is Microsoft’s cross-platform command-line tool for managing Azure resources such as virtual machines and disks from the command line. It’s available for macOS, Linux, and Windows, this is also found in Different cloud vendor for example For Amazon it’s called aws cli, for Oracle it’s Called OCI-CLI and Google it’s called GCP-CLI.

az vm create --resource-group TestResourceGroup --name test-wp1-eus-vm --image win2016datacenter --admin-username osama --admin-password anything

Programmatic (APIs)

This is no my expertise so i will no go deep dive with it, But we were talking about Azure CLI and powershell, you can install something called Azure REST API and start using differen programing language to deal with Azure, i did this with python for AWS using Boto3 module, i post about it before here.

The same can be done for Azure or any Cloud vendor.

Azure VM Extensions

Azure VM extensions are small applications that allow you to configure and automate tasks on Azure VMs after initial deployment. Azure VM extensions can be run with the Azure CLI, PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager templates, and the Azure portal.

Thank you

Osama Mustafa