Exercise - Work with blades

Working with blades

Once you are logged into the Azure portal, we can start exploring things. In these sections, you will get a tour of the "blades" user interface element (windows within the Azure portal window), but you will not actually create any Azure resources.

1. Let's start by touring how to create a resource. In the left-hand portion of the portal click Create a resource.
2. A blade labeled New appears and displays a list of categories on the left-hand side, labeled Azure Marketplace. This is somewhat like a "Popular Categories" menu, with some of the most common categories visible. If you'd like, you can expand this list to see everything in the Marketplace blade with the See all link next to the heading. If you do, you can get back to the New blade by clicking the X icon in the upper right of any blades you have opened.
3. Selecting any of items in the Azure Marketplace list will show popular services for that category on the right of the New blade. This list is a subset of the entire range of computing resources available for that category. As with the Azure Marketplace, you can click on the See all link for a more comprehensive list. We will talk more about this list in subsequent sections.
4. Returning to the New blade, click on Get started and you should see a list on the right side of the blade that includes services such as Windows Server 2016 VM, Ubuntu Server VM, SQL Database, and so on. Most of these items include a Quickstart tutorial link directly below the name. Clicking this link will open a new browser tab with the quickstart Microsoft documentation for that item, if you need it.
5. Optional: Click Quickstart tutorial under Windows Server 2016 VM and, in the new browser window, look through the Windows VM tutorials. When you are finished, close this new tab to return to the Azure portal.

Viewing resources

1. Under Azure Marketplace, click Compute to show more compute options on the right side of the blade, such as Red Hat Enterprise, Reserved VM Instances, Web app for Containers, and so on.
2. To the right of Featured, click See all. The full list of available VM services now appears.
3. Under Recommended, click Windows Server. A new Windows Server blade appears to the right.
4. To the right of the Pin blade to dashboard icon in the blade's title bar, click the Maximize icon (it looks like a simple empty square or box). The Windows Server blade now fills the screen, except for the left-hand pane. Scroll down the list to see all of the Windows Server images available.
5. Optionally, you can click the Restore icon (similar to the Maximize icon, a simple empty square or box with another one on top) to return to the previous blade view.
6. Click the X at the top right-hand corner to close the Windows Server blade. You should now see the New blade again.

Filtering results

1. Another way to locate services is to refine the list with filters and search terms. On the New blade, you may have noticed the search box at the top. This is the quickest way to filter what services you see, but this search checks every Azure service to get its results. If you'd like to learn how to filter after selecting a category, continue to the next steps.
2. On the Compute blade, you can see these various options at the top, a search box and some labeled dropdown boxes.
3. Type virtual machine images into the search box and press ENTER. You should now see a filtered list of Compute services related to virtual machine images.
4. Explore the available dropdown filter boxes by clicking on the down arrow (it looks a bit like a chevron) and try some of them out. When you are satisfied, move on to the next step.
5. Click the X in the right-hand end of the search box. This will erase your search term but does not reset any of the drop-down filters you've set. You can either reset those manually, or simply close the Compute blade with the X icon in the upper right corner and re-open it. When you are finished trying out the search and filtering options, move on to the next step.
6. Click the X at the top right-hand corner to close the Compute blade.
7. Click the X at the top right-hand corner to close the Marketplace blade. Now you will see the New blade once again.
8. Click the X at the top right-hand corner to close the New blade.

The default dashboard now appears.

Many of the principles you have learned in this exercise will apply throughout the Azure portal UI experience. In the next unit, you will continue your journey in the Azure portal and configure additional settings in Azure.