Azure cloud security tutorial series – Chapter 1 [Azure Account]

Basic Overview 

Azure is the mostly used cloud in IT organizations. Before cloud came into existence many companies or organizations were using Microsoft products in their organization like Windows OS, MS Office and even Microsoft server OS on their servers for running internal authentication server called AD and others. So it is easy for all organization to move to cloud that too of Microsoft, as the organization IT admins were already having hands on Microsoft products. So after cloud came into existence many organization migrated to cloud of Microsoft called Azure. There are few terms to understand before we move further:

Azure –  It’s a name given to Microsoft cloud.

Azure subscription – As we have a ticket to theme park. Once we have the ticket we can play around with all the rides in that theme park. Just like a ticket Azure subscription is a ticket to get into Azure and play around or we can say utilize different resources available there. These resources can be Virtual machines, Storage, database.  

VNet – Azure cloud is very vast having thousands of Systems, Databases and other devices connected together. VNet provide a logical isolation of Azure cloud dedicated to your Azure subscription.  With VNet you can connect your Azure resources with your on premises network.

Subnets – It’s a subset of Azure VNet. With the help of subnet you can segment your Azure resources within VNet in a smaller address space. 

Address space – To understand what address space is, think of a network where each device is allocated an IP Address between 192.168.1.0 to 192.168.1.255. So for the network 192.168.1.0-192.168.1.255 is the address space. 

Virtual machine – To understand the Virtual machine concepts, think that Microsoft has purchased a big computer and connected that computer on cloud. Now to earn money from this big computer on cloud, Microsoft decided to create small computers from this big computer and will rent these small or you can say virtual computers to the world. The more people will use these virtual computers the more Microsoft will earn. 

Now to understand Azure in a practical manner. We will start by creating a VNet in Azure tutorials and under this VNet we will create 2 subnets. Under each subnet we will add one Virtual machine.

Follow below steps to create account in Azure portal and subscription.

  1. Go to https://azure.com
  1. Go to Try Azure for Free
  2. And then go to start free
  1. It will ask to login into microsoftonline.com portal, if you don’t have credentials create new.
  1. Once you are logged in you will have to fill in below form:
  1. Next it will ask for credit or debit card information. You will be charged when you will migrate from pay as you go service. As we have opted for Free account we will get $200 approx. 13K INR of credit.
  2. It will debit Rs. 2 from your card and once payment is confirmed you will be redirected to Go to Azure portal page.
  1. Now go to Azure portal button or go to https://portal.azure.com login as email and password you provide to login in microsoftonline.com. Once you are logged in you will land onto Azure dashboard.