Prepare to work with Azure

Now that you’ve identified the Azure resources that you’ll need to deploy the application, you can determine how to create and manage those resources in the Azure environment. You should also be sure that your environment is ready to move forward with the deployment.

How do you create and manage resources on Azure?

You can create and manage resources on Azure either in the Azure portal or through command-line tools, such as the Azure CLI.

The Azure portal gives you a browser-based interface for administering your Azure resources. Using the portal is often easier for new users or for finding information quickly, but it’s not a very scalable way to create or manage resources and it doesn’t allow you to script actions or implement other forms of automation.

The Azure CLI is a cross-platform tool that allows you to use your operating system’s command line to manage Azure resources. This might initially be more challenging than the portal experience, but it allows you to script any of your actions, making them repeatable if you need to change or recreate an action.

Before starting the next lab, make sure that you can sign in to the Azure portal with the provided lab credentials.

Note that, after confirming your access to the Azure portal, we’ll be primarily performing all actions using the Azure CLI. It’s a good idea to verify that the Azure CLI was correctly installed in your lab environment.

To verify that you’re running an up-to-date version of the Azure CLI, in the command-line window, run the following:

az --version

This command should return a value of 2.60.0 or later. If it doesn’t, be sure that you’ve followed the guidance in the Installation instructions.

There are other tools that you’ll use, including Git and mvn, but the Azure portal and the Azure CLI are the primary ones for the initial deployment of the application into Azure.

For later reference, we recommend that you record any commands and scripts you execute. This will help you in the subsequent exercises, in case you need to reuse them to repeat a sequence of steps.

In the lab, you’ll execute a lot of Azure CLI statements. If you’re using Visual Studio Code, you can record these statements in a file with the .azcli extension. This extension, in combination with Azure CLI Tools, gives you extra features, like IntelliSense, along with the ability to directly run a statement in the terminal window from the script file.

Make sure that your development environment is ready

Before you move on to the next lab, your development environment needs to be ready with all the required tools and a downloaded local copy of the example application code. If you haven’t already, follow the guidance in the Installation instructions to make sure that you’re ready to proceed.