1. Understanding Azures Infrastructure
Welcome! Let's explore the fundamentals of managing Azure by focusing on resources and resource groups and how to work with them effectively.
2. Cipher Coffee
Meet Cipher Coffee, a booming coffee shop chain. They’ve been gathering data on inventory, sales, and customer feedback from all their locations—but managing and analyzing all that information has become a real challenge. They’re ready to modernize their systems, centralize operations, and make smarter, data-driven decisions. That’s where Azure steps in to help.
3. Cipher Coffee
Throughout this course, we’ll follow Cipher Coffee’s journey and see how Azure’s tools help them to tackle real-world challenges—like restocking inventory and improving the customer experience.
4. Resources
Cipher Coffee is looking to modernize its operations by leveraging Azure resources.
So, what is a resource in Azure? A resource is any manageable item you can create or use within Azure's environment.
Some examples of resources Cipher Coffee will require:
A virtual machine hosting their inventory app.
A storage account to securely store customer loyalty data.
A database to organize and analyze sales records.
5. Services and Resources
Another important concept to cover is a service. A service refers to a category of features like 'Compute,' 'Storage,' or 'Networking', while a resource is the specific product or instance of a service, such as a virtual machine for Compute, storage accounts for Storage, or a virtual network for Networking.
6. Resource groups
Running a coffee shop requires multiple resources, so it's best to organize them effectively and efficiently. This is where resource groups come in.
7. Resource group
To keep everything organized, Cipher Coffee uses a resource group. This allows them to group related resources—like the virtual machine, storage account, and databases under one umbrella. With this setup, they can monitor performance, control access, track costs, and even delete the entire group if needed.
8. Managing Azure Resources
The Azure portal is a visual and user-friendly interface that makes it simple to create, update, manage resources and set up usage alerts for performance. However, while this course focuses on the Azure portal, tools like the Azure CLI and API offer additional flexibility for automating workflows or managing large-scale operations.
9. Let's practice!
Let’s jump back into the portal and get hands-on experience managing resources!