Azure Preview Portal

A new Azure management portal is now available as a public preview. The new design employs a tile-based user interface. Tiles are displayed on the Startboard view (shown at left) and allow monitoring items such as data center status and fees incurred or can provide shortcuts to particular deployed Azure resources. The tiles shown and their size and arrangement can be customized.

Clicking on a tile drills into its information by displaying vertical user interface “blades” that are added sequentially to the right side of the screen (two blades are shown at right). A group of blades is called a journey, and multiple journeys can remain in progress. The currently displayed journey can be selected using the Journeys tool (located in the toolbar shown at the left edge).

The preview portal exposes a new Resource Groups feature (which can also be accessed using PowerShell scripts). A Resource Group is a logical container that provides a view of all deployed Azure resources used by a particular application. For example, an application may use virtual machines, databases, and an Azure Web Apps. A Resource Group unifies provisioning and monitoring of the application, including tracking all costs incurred by that application alone. Resource Groups can be pinned to the Startboard for quick access.