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What Azure Is

Scope: the cloud in one paragraph, where Azure's computers live, and the three ways you talk to it.

The one-paragraph version

Azure is Microsoft renting you computers. Instead of buying a server, you ask Azure for a virtual machine, it exists two minutes later in a Microsoft data center, and you pay for each minute it's on. When you're done, you delete it and the billing stops. The same idea covers disks, databases, and networks: everything is a rented resource, created by an API call, billed by usage.

If that sounds like AWS or Google Cloud — it is the same idea, with Microsoft's names on everything. The concepts in this guide (regions, resource groups, virtual networks) have direct equivalents in the other clouds.

Regions: where the computers are

Azure's data centers are grouped into regions — named places like eastus (Virginia), westeurope (Netherlands), or centralus (Iowa). Three things to know:

  1. Pick one region and stay in it. Resources in the same region talk to each other fast and free; traffic between regions is slower and billed.
  2. Pick one close to you (or to your users). Virginia from Texas is fine; Singapore from Texas is a quarter-second round trip you'll feel on every SSH keystroke.
  3. Not every service exists in every region. New or exotic services launch in a handful of regions first. VMs, storage, and databases are everywhere.

Region names come in two flavors: the display name ("East US") and the short name (eastus). Commands want the short name.

Check: list the regions your subscription can see (requires login; (documented)):

$ az account list-locations --output table

The three ways to talk to Azure

Everything in Azure — portal clicks included — ends up as an API call. You have three doors into the same building:

Door What it is Best for
Portal The website, portal.azure.com Learning, one-off tasks, seeing what's there
CLI The az command Scripts, repeatable tasks, this guide
API / SDKs REST calls, or libraries in your language Programs that manage Azure themselves

The portal is the friendliest way to learn; the CLI is the friendliest way to repeat. This guide leans on the CLI because commands can be checked and copied, and because "click the blue button" instructions rot faster than flags do. Anything the CLI does, the portal can do too — they create the same resources.

Installing the CLI

Windows (winget), macOS (Homebrew), and Linux (package manager or pip) are all supported — see Microsoft's install page for the current command. Verify it:

$ az --version
azure-cli                         2.x.x
...

Check: az --version prints a version table. If the shell says "command not found," the install didn't finish or your PATH needs a new terminal.

Then sign in (opens a browser; (documented)):

$ az login

az login prints a JSON list of your subscriptions. Everything from here on assumes you're signed in.

What Azure is not

  • Not a VPS with training wheels. A $5 VPS gives you one box; Azure gives you a hundred services with separate bills. Power and complexity come together.
  • Not free. There is a free tier (see Pricing and Cost Control), but the default posture is "everything meters." Respect that and you'll be fine; ignore it and you'll learn about it from your credit card.
  • Not magic. A VM in Azure is a VM. SSH works the same, Linux is Linux. The cloud part is provisioning and billing, not the computer itself.