Windows Azure Experience–Part 2: Management Portal

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.   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.

Navigation

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

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.

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