Microsoft Azure Portals
September 12, 2016If you’re getting started with Microsoft Azure, you may feel confused about where things are located. One of the reasons for this confusion is the current use of multiple portals. It’s hard enough to learn how subscriptions work, how to access the resources through PowerShell and all of those new concepts without having to navigate different sites. This post should shed some light on what the portals are and how they’re used.
Billing Portal
The services for Azure aren’t free and we will want to know how much these services cost. The billing portal allows us to manage our subscriptions, create new ones and view how much those subscriptions cost our organization.
Classic Portal
Microsoft jumped into the public cloud offerings long ago and the classic portal is where it all began. This portal gave Microsoft it’s first public cloud portal. Initial services were published here in the catalog and are still available for use. If you’re new to Microsoft Azure, you may start with the new portal, but many services will redirect you here if they haven’t been ported over yet.
New Portal
The new portal was previously known as the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) portal. So anytime you hear ARM, think this new portal. The new portal should be the go forward location to build new services and many of the services in the classic portal are being ported over to this site. Each of the services here are represented, not by a different web page, but a “blade”. These blades open depending on the properties of the service that is opened.
Some services here in the new portal haven’t been ported over yet. If you browse for services, some of them will have a special icon to let you know you’re changing to a different portal to set them up.
Summary
Hopefully this post has shed some light on what the purpose of each of the portals is. I neglected to tell you that there is actually a fourth portal thats not in this list called the Enterprise Portal. This portal gives customers with enterprise agreements (EA) the ability to manage multiple accounts, and yes this has its own portal to do so.
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