Consider tools for connecting to and managing your Azure environment

You have now identified the resources you will need to proceed with the first stage of the migration and determined the optimal way of organizing them. Next, you need to consider how you will connect to your Azure environment. Ask yourself the following questions:

What tools would you need for connecting to the Azure platform?

For connecting to the Azure platform, you can use either the Azure portal, or command line tools such as Azure CLI. The latter might be more challenging, but it will facilitate scripting your setup and making it repeatable in case anything needs to change or recreated. In your lab environment, make sure you can log into the Azure portal by using the credentials that were provided to you for running the lab.

It is also a good idea to double check whether Azure CLI was correctly installed in your lab environment by running the following command from the Git Bash shell window:

az --help

Check the cli version. It should be 2.51.0 or later.

az --version

There are other tools you will use as well (including Git and mvn), but the portal and Azure CLI will be the primary ones you will be using during the initial deployment of your application into Azure.

You also should record any commands and scripts you execute for later reference. This will help you in the subsequent exercises, in case you need to reuse them to repeat the same sequence of steps.

In the lab you will make a lot of use of Azure CLI statements. In case you are using Visual Studio Code, you can record your statements in a file with the .azcli extension. This extension in combination with the Azure CLI Tools give you extra capabilities like IntelliSense and directly running a statement from the script file in the terminal window.

What additional tools would you need to perform the migration?

In case you chose Azure Spring Apps as the target platform, there are no additional tools needed for your to perform the migration steps.

In case you chose ACA or AKS as the target platform, you will also need Docker tools to containerize the microservices that the application consists of. You will also need to consider the most optimal base image for containerizing the microservices.

With all of the above questions answered, you now have a good understanding of the steps and resources needed to perform your migration. In the next exercise you will execute its first phase.