For exercises in this chapter, you’ll need the Azure CLI. The process of installing and configuring it will be explained later in this chapter.

To start building your applications using Azure, you’ll need an account. An account in Azure is in fact a subscription, which acts as a high-level building block, allowing charges for Azure services to be linked with your payment method. There are several ways to create an account – we’ll try to find the one that suits you the best.

Note that most of the accounts for Azure aren’t free of charge. However, as you may not always be able to access an account provided by your company, we’ll also try to find a way to be able to learn without spending a penny.

Types of Azure accounts

In general, accounts in Azure can be put in one of two categories:

• Work or school accounts
• Personal accounts

The names of these accounts describe exactly what they are – if you’re an employee, you may be given access to a work account. Such a work account may have access to Microsoft Azure, so you don’...

As we’re going to discuss both the Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell, we need to install them first. The installation process is pretty straightforward for both of these tools; however, before we proceed, we need to quickly explain both of these tools. If you don’t want to install the tools locally or use your local machine, you can use Cloud Shell, which is a dedicated environment available to all Azure accounts. You can read more about it at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/get-started/azure-portal/cloud-shell.

Understanding the importance of the CLI

While your main work environment may be an IDE and a specific programming framework, when working with Azure, you’ll realize that there are additional areas of work that need to be covered. You may create and configure resources in Azure using the Azure portal, but that way of working is rarely advisable and, if possible, should be avoided. In many cases, you could...

To start working with Azure, you’ll need to understand how to perform certain operations, such as signing in, switching accounts, and even switching tenants. We’ll get to that shortly, but before we start, let’s discuss briefly how Azure is structured.

Basic Azure structure

In Azure, there are several building blocks, which you’ll be using when developing applications and infrastructure. The main building block is called the tenant. A tenant is the most important component as it links Azure subscriptions with user accounts. When you create an Azure account, it’s automatically linked to a new tenant (unless your account is a work/school account, which is created inside an existing tenant).

If you went through the Azure account creation process, you created three separate components:

• Azure tenant
• Azure subscription
• User account in Azure tenant (global/account administrator)

To help you understand...

To understand service principals and managed identities, let’s consider the following scenario: you’re developing an application that allows users to upload photos from a user and store them in Azure. If you want to use a managed cloud service such as Azure Storage, you’ll need to find a way to authorize upload operations. In Azure, there are two options:

• Use an access key
• Use an access token

Using an access key, which can be quickly developed and deployed, is the simplest option. It’s also the least desirable from the security point of view as it requires your application to store and manage access keys. A much better option (in terms of management and design) is to allow your application to obtain an access token. In this scenario, you’d control access to Azure services by giving your application a certain set of permissions.

If you want to leverage that option, you’ll...

Azure is one of the most popular platforms for building applications with a cloud infrastructure. To develop those applications, we need to be able to integrate our local workstation with Azure’s capabilities. Being a developer means that your main working environment is an IDE. The choice of a suitable IDE relies on the technology stack you’re using. If you’re .NET developer, you may work with applications such as Visual Studio or Rider. Java developers might be using IntelliJ or Eclipse. Python developers may use PyCharm. There are many choices, so it’s important to understand the implications of our decisions, especially when thinking about development in Azure.

Note

In this book, we’re going to focus on the most popular technology stacks that are closely related to Azure. This means that we’re not going to talk about languages such as C, C++, or Rust, as they’re rarely used with...

In order to integrate your IDE with Azure, you need to check whether plugins and workloads are available for it. To help you with that, I have prepared a quick summary with links, which will help you set up your local environment.

JetBrains IntelliJ

IntelliJ (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/developer/java/toolkit-for-intellij/install-toolkit) provides quite an advanced extension for working with Azure that enables you to work with the following Azure services:

• Azure Web App
• Azure Functions
• Azure Container Apps
• Azure Storage
• Azure Virtual Machine
• Azure Redis Cache
• Azure OpenAI

It’s a great choice for all web developers who want to encapsulate all their work within the same tool without needing to use additional tools.

Eclipse

Eclipse (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/developer/java/toolkit-for-eclipse/installation) is another IDE that allows you to work with Azure, though the integration...

No matter which IDE you choose, it’s important to be aware of additional tools that could be useful when developing an application. Let’s start with WSL, which could help to provide a uniform local setup for all developers inside a team.

WSL

WSL (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install) is one of the best features for developers using mixed operating systems (Windows/Linux/macOS). It can also be helpful if you want to get the most out of tools that target UNIX-based systems at first (which is often true for software meant for the development of containerized applications). WSL gives you the ability to work on your Windows machine as if it were running a Linux-based operating system, making development much easier in a number of ways (for instance, it allows you to develop, run, and test shell scripts on Ubuntu, which is very often used as a default operating system for CI/CD pipelines runners).

Another...

When developing an application, you often need to decide how local development is performed. While running an application locally is quite a simple task, running its dependencies may be challenging. Let’s discuss how to decouple real Azure services from local workstations so that every developer can host their own environment that is secure from outages and unwanted changes.

Benefits of emulators

Consider the following scenario: you’re developing an application that requires an SQL database. If that application is hosted on Azure, it may be tempting to deploy a dedicated Azure SQL instance for development only. This, however, has serious implications:

• Developers are going to share the same instance of a database.
• If Azure SQL isn’t available, local development is affected.
• It’s difficult to test changes in isolation.

To overcome those problems, you’ll need to consider the following options:

...

In this chapter, you learned about the basic structure and operations of Azure. We discussed how you can obtain access to the Azure environment and explored the differences between work/school and personal accounts. You also learned how to sign in to your account, switch the working context, and change the Azure tenant if needed.

We also talked about service principals and managed identities, which will become some of the most important components in the next chapters. In the last part of this chapter, we covered IDEs and additional plugins and emulators that may help you when developing applications in Azure. This knowledge will become important in the next chapters, as we’ll start building simple applications to showcase certain features of Azure services.

In the next chapter, we’ll cover the differences between the Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell. Going through this topic will help you build your own scripts and integrate them with CI/CD pipelines, which...