Windows Azure Experience–Part 2: Management Portal

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This Part 2 of a series of posts about my “upgrade” to Windows Azure. Next up in this series is the Windows Azure Management Portal.  It can be accessed directly at https://manage.windowsazure.com/ or by visiting https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/ and clicking on the portal link in the upper hand corner. SNAGHTMLba8532e[5]   To access the portal you will need to sign in with the same Windows Live account that you used to create the account.

Note: There are two different sign is screens available, one for those the use a Microsoft Account for Office 365 and one that use a “regular” Windows Live account like hotmail.com or msn.com.

The “home page” for the portal is broken up into 4 parts: image  

Part 1 - Navigation Bar

The navigation bar allows you to view documentation, pricing, downloads, community and support. You can also change the language and access your account.

Part 2 – “Table of Contents”

This lets you access off of the Windows Azure Services that you have.  There will be a number beneath each services which indicates what have many “items” you have activated with that service.  In my example, I have 1 Web Site and 2 SQL Databases.  You can click on any of these to access the service.

Part 3 – Main Body

This is where the settings or actions of the service items live.  In the example above, you see all items which lists all of the services I have and their current status. For the “All Items” selection you get a list of all the services that you have a subscription and their statuses.  Windows Azure allows you to have multiple subscriptions linked to one account, that is why the subscription column is present. image

Part 4 – App Bar

The app bar is synonymous with the  Windows 8 app bar, it provides actions that you can take based on what service you are in and what item is selected. In the example above I have a web site selected so I am presented with the ability to:

  • Create a new Web Site
  • Browse the Site
  • Stop the Site
  • Restart the Site
  • Manage Domains
  • Delete the Site
  • Install Web Matrix
  • View (context sensitive) Help