'G' is for Getting started with Azure

Introduction

It seemed too fitting that for my first blog entry that the topic should be ‘Getting started with Azure’ because one of the most common questions I see getting raised in various online forums or social media sites etc. is this very topic. People interested in the cloud, but don’t know where to begin and I can’t blame them, it’s an ever-growing ever-changing technology and if you’re not already familiar where do you begin?

For some personal context, lets wind the clock back about four and half years. I was a complete novice when it came to Azure and ‘the cloud’ in general, I didn't know my App Services to my Zone Redundancy. If you're reading that and don't what those are either, don't worry we'll get to those. I'd been working as a Lead IT Engineer/ Level 2 Technician for a managed service provider (MSP) who looked after education-based customers. Education is notorious for being a bit behind the times, and my experience was no exception. Everything was primarily on-premises / primarily all using Windows Active Directory with endpoints (desktops) older than me.

Now I'd dabbled in Microsoft Entra (Formerly Azure Active Directory) and the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal for things like Exchange Online but that was about as far as my cloud exposure went, but I wanted to learn and do more with the cloud I just didn’t know where to begin or how I would even begin for that matter?

So how do I start?

Now if you’re reading this and are sat there thinking ‘This sounds similar to my situation’ or maybe you’re completely new to the professional IT industry like I was nearly a decade ago, having just started or about to start your career path to becoming an IT/ Cloud Engineer etc. either way, one of the best pieces of advice I can provide for anyone wanting to get into Cloud, more specifically in this case Azure is ‘You start, by starting’ and before you roll your eyes hear me out!

Think about what it is that interests you, are you interested in Infrastructure? Things like virtual machines and cloud storage or maybe you’re interested in Security? Things like Firewalls, cryptographic Key Vaults and Identity Access Management (IAM). Ultimately whatever your answer, this is what will help you start your journey into Azure and will narrow down your starting point. This starting point is going to be different for everyone; there is no silver bullet to getting into Azure.

Let me give some examples, and we’ll get into more details of the ‘how’ as we go.

1. Let’s say you’re interested in networking, and I don’t mean mingling at a conference. Do you know what a CIDR block is, what subnets are? because if the answer is yes then you’re probably already fairly familiar with different networking technologies and terminology and for those of you in this or a similar scenario that knowledge you already have will still apply to the cloud, the primary start point here is to get yourself familiar with some core cloud concepts and understanding the networking services on offer and applying your existing knowledge.

2. Okay, but what if you're interested in getting into Azure, but maybe you’re completely new to the IT industry and don’t have any idea about what area to focus on/ interests you the most? Thankfully, Microsoft provides an entire library of guides and documentation, and this is where I suggest you start your journey, get yourself familiar with the Cloud. Understand the basics, and then from there you can start to branch out and experiment with what area of the cloud you enjoy because that broader foundational knowledge will be crucial as you progress.

For both of these examples there are a few points of Interest I want to highlight as a good place to start. The first of which is the Azure Fundamentals Learning Course on Microsoft Learn, this offers a very high-level overview of the Azure platform covering the different services on offer, as well explaining some of the key cloud concepts and how the platform functions. And as mentioned in the second example, once you have that baseline knowledge of the Azure platform that knowledge will be fundamental going forward for anything and everything you do in Azure.

There are two ways you can approach this; you can book into the paid tutored learning course or the recommended (and free) method is to go through the self-paced learning modules towards the bottom of the page. Each section in the learning path contains different modules that will cover all of the core concepts and services on offer within Azure, there is no time limit so you can work through at whatever pace works best for you, for me I found consistency is key. Where possible I would study for about 1 - 2 hours every other day both after work and on weekends/ downtime here or there. I would estimate it took me around three months to get a firm grasp on things, now I want to stress this is going to be different for everyone. We all learn at different paces so don’t worry if you get to the three-month marker and you’re not ‘there’ yet, that’s okay! take your time, don’t rush it because you’ll thank yourself later.

Side note: I would strongly recommend setting up a Microsoft Learn Profile if you don’t already have one by selecting the Sign in option at the top of the page, you can use any existing Microsoft account (Outlook, Hotmail) or any other email address you have. This will allow you to track your learning progress, utilise some other options that I’ll explain when we get to them. And should you choose to do so in the future, register for Microsoft Certification Exams but that’s a topic for another day.

As you work through the self-paced learning path, you’ll notice that some of the modules contain an exercise section where it will guide you through some hands-on experience, like the one shown in the screenshot below. Speaking from personal experience, I really recommend taking the time to do these exercises, if you are due to go somewhere, I’d suggest save them and come back to them later. Generally speaking, they shouldn’t take no more than around 10 - 15 minutes to complete, some longer than others but if you are new to Azure, then these are a great way to start to get that hands-on experience with the user interface of the Azure portal as well gain some familiarity with the different services and what they do.

For each of these exercises, Microsoft provides Sandbox environment that you will need to complete the account verification for as shown below on the left. Once you’ve completed this step, to the right of your window a free sandbox instance will begin to be deployed for you to complete the exercise along with the step-by-step instructions from creation to deletion. What I found helpful and something I recommend is to do the exercise to start with but before you delete your resource to ‘clean up’ after you are done, I really encourage you to have a look around the Azure Portal, be inquisitive and get yourself as familiar with the interface as you can.

Optional - Create your Azure instance

Let’s say you’ve worked through around half of the modules and exercises, but you want to go back over what you’ve learned already maybe to experiment outside of the pre-made sandboxes. Again, completely optional but something I found very useful as a kinesthetic learner (someone who learns by doing) the more hands-on time I got, the more it helped me grasp the written knowledge.

So, I decided to setup my own ‘Azure Sandbox’ instance and use it to go back over the exercises on my own and re-create the deployments without the instructions in my own. If this is something you want to do, then you will need a Credit or Debit Card as a payment method, this is a requirement to be able to use any cloud resources but fear not as long as you follow the guidance below, some best practices and utilise the free services available, you'll pay next to nothing. The most I've ever spent for an entire month my early learning stages was no more than around £5 and that was from leaving a Virtual Machine running.

If you’ve never setup an Azure account before, then good news! you will be eligible for a bunch of bonuses as a first-time user.

This includes:

• $200 free credit for your first 30 days, pay-as-you-go pricing will apply after the 30 days or credit is up.

• Free monthly amounts of 20+ of the most popular azure services, the full list can be found here but some of the highlights include:

  • 750 hours/ month of selected Linux and Windows Virtual Machines

  • 5GB of ‘Hot’ Blob Storage in an Azure Storage Account

  • 500 minutes runtime for jobs in Azure Automation Accounts

1. To get started go to the following link and select the ‘Try Azure for free’ option

2. 

   You will need to sign in with a Microsoft account for this, once signed in you will then be guided through a setup process. Simply follow the on-screen instructions, you will need to give your tenant a name etc. and you will need your credit and or debit card. Microsoft will charge a £1/ $1 or your regional equivalent as verification fee to verify the payment method, this fee will be refunded back to you within a few days.

3. Once the above is completed, that’s it you now have your very own demo tenant that should look something like the screenshot below to experiment with as you please! but we’re not done yet. One of the most common pitfalls I’ve seen from people new to the cloud, is users spinning up some resource(s) then either forgetting to turn off/ stop the resource in the case of say a virtual machine for example or forgetting to delete the resource entirely and then end up with a large charge to their Debit or Credit Card.

   

4. To make sure you don’t fall into this same trap, Azure provides some tools to help avoid this in form of billing alerts. These alerts can trigger an email notification that will alert you if your cloud spend is expected to or has exceeded a certain spend threshold. To configure your alert, start by going to the search bar across the very top of the Azure portal page, start typing “Cost Management” and you will see under services ‘Cost Management + Billing’ option, click this.

   

5. You will then be directed to a new page, and it should look something like the one shown below. You will likely see two options listed; these are your subscriptions. You should have one called something like ‘Free Trial’ which is your $200 free credit from Microsoft if you redeemed the introductory offer, and the other should be called something like ‘Pay-as-you-Go’ this will be the subscription linked to your Credit and or Debit Card. If you do have the $200 (or your regional equivalent) free credit, this will always be used first before any charges are made to your personal Debit or Credit Card, but this credit is only valid for 30 days or until it’s used up so configuring these alerts now might save you a headache later.

   

6. Click into the ‘Pay-as-you-Go’ Subscription, and you will get a screen similar to this shown below. To the left of the screen on the menu blade, you will see an option called Cost Management if it’s not expanded, click the dropdown arrow and then click into the Budgets menu option.

   

7. Once selected, you will get another screen appear like the screenshot below, as I already have a budget configured the headings under the table are populated. To create your own budget, select the option that says +Add towards the top of the Azure Portal.

   

8. Now, let’s create our budget. As this is just for demo purposes, something like ‘maximum-spend’ should suffice but please note in a more professional environment this would need to be more meaningful as typically businesses use multiple subscriptions either for different projects or even production levels. We’ll cover subscriptions in more detail at a later date.

9. Now that we’ve given our budget a name, we can choose our reset period. This will be how often our budget is reset so either monthly, quarterly or yearly. I would recommend leaving it as the default monthly but again for professional environments, typically this would be quarterly or yearly.

10. Next, we have Creation Date and Expiration date, you can leave this as the default, as it’s applied for two years.

11. Finally, we can set our budget amount under the Budget details. You can set this to whatever amount you feel combatable with, too low and you’ll be getting alerts in a matter of minutes, too high and you might spend more than you want so I suggest starting with between £10-£15 or your regional equivalent.

    

12. Now that we have our budget set, we need to setup our alerts so click Next to the Set Alerts Tab, and under Alert conditions setup the thresholds that you feel comfortable with. ‘Forecasted’ will notify you when your budget is expected to reach the % you set. ‘Actual’ will notify you when your cloud spend has reached that % amount. You could set an actual alert for 25%, 50% and 75% with a forecasted alert for 100% to begin with but ultimately it is up to you.

13. Finally Alert recipients will be the email account(s) that you want the notification sent too, you can configure multiple email accounts adding one per line if you have primary and secondary accounts for example. Language can be left as default unless you want to receive the alerts in a separate language otherwise click create. PLEASE NOTE: This is just for alerts, these will not stop or prevent resources from costs. You will be required to manually stop, delete or use automation via action groups to prevent any further recurring costs.

    

14. That’s it! you now have your very own demo azure tenant with budget alerts configured to experiment and use as you please alongside the learning material.

Final conclusions

Getting started with Azure can feel like stepping into a vast, ever-evolving landscape—but the key is consistency, not intensity. This isn’t something to cram over a weekend or even a single week. Instead, set yourself up with short manageable learning sessions: maybe 1–2 hours every other day, or even just 40 minutes during your daily commute.

Remember, progress in the cloud is a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time, explore what interests you, and don’t be afraid to experiment. The more you engage with Azure and get that hands-on exposure, the more confident and capable you’ll become.