Now that our account has been set up,
let's go ahead and click on the portal link.
This will take us to the new Windows Azure portal.
The Azure portal is a completely HTML5 based solution.
So, you should be able to hit this portal from any web browser and any device.
That will include devices such as
iPads, Android tablets, Windows devices, surfaces.
You'll be able to access your
Azure capabilities and manage them at any point.
You'll also notice we're going to be greeted by a little tour here.
If we click through this you'll see it's going to
show you in the top right, the main menu.
We have the ability to change our password, look at our bill,
as well as our account information that we saw in the previous section.
We also have the ability to Create New services.
Services are divided into
Compute, Data Services, App Services, Networks, and the Store.
We're going to cover each of these as we move through the course.
At the bottom we have an application bar.
This command bar will give you ability to fire
off commands based on the current screen that you're on.
You'll notice that most of these icons and buttons are very big, making it
very easy if you're on a touch interface to go ahead on click on them.
We also
have Notifications.
Notifications in the Azure portal are asynchronous, meaning you do not
have to wait on a screen for that action to complete.
For example, I could create a new virtual machine and then
move over to sequel database and create a new sequel instance.
And all of that will run in the background.
If you've looked at Azure before, you may have seen the old portal.
So if I come up here to the top right and hit Previous portal.
This previous portal was Silverlight based, and it allowed you to go
ahead and look at everything that wasn't in the new Azure portal.
As you can see on this machine, I do not have Silverlight installed, and
I have the capability to access all of the Azure services from the normal portal.
For everything we're going to cover in this
course, we're going to be using the normal
portal, and in fact, you don't need
to access the old portal for anything anymore.
If I move over here onto the left, you'll see I have the ability to
look at Websites, Virtual Machines, Mobile Services, Cloud
Services, SQL Databases, and all types of storage.
We're going to be covering each one of these in future chapters in this course.
So don't worry too much about them right now.
But know that this is how easy it is
to access all of the stats, information, and configuration settings
for each of those services in Azure.
If I wanted to create a new service, I would simply come down here to the bottom.
Hit New and select the type of service that I want.
So you can see I could hit Websites, Virtual Machines, Mobile Services or
Cloud Services simply by moving through this new menu of the command bar.
If I want to get back to the main Azure portal with information about pricing,
documentation, codes samples.
All of that is available here in the top left, if I click
Show Menu, you'll see I have the
same Downloads, Community, Support, Documentation, and Pricing.
So if I hit Documentation, this will take me directly
to the documentation for all of the different Azure services.