Azure Portal Geared Toward Solutions

The Web-based Azure Portal presents user interfaces (UIs) for customers to provision, manage, and monitor resources they deploy in Azure. The current portal, an ambitious redesign, became generally available in Dec. 2015. It’s based on a new infrastructure called Resource Manager, which enables Azure resources to be managed in groups, making it easier to work with solutions that use multiple resource instances. New features could help IT staff and developers monitor, secure, and navigate Azure better than before. The previous portal remains supported; however, it is likely to be discontinued, so organizations should be transitioning to the new portal.

Resource Groups Organize Solutions

The Azure Portal is the primary UI for working with Azure. Azure resources include items such as virtual machines (VMs), virtual networks, databases, and instances of Platform as a Service offerings such as Web Apps and machine learning. These resources can be deployed and managed with other tools, such as PowerShell, the Azure command-line interface (CLI), and Visual Studio, but the portal provides the most readily accessible and visual experience, so all Azure users should be familiar with it.