Get Started with the Azure portal and Azure App service

Hi, I'm Scott Hanselman, and welcome to Microsoft Azure. This is the Azure portal. It's a unified hub in your browser that simplifies the building, the deployment, and the managing of all your cloud resources. It puts it in one easy-to-use console. I'm going to send you through a quick tour of what you can do in the Azure portal. Then we'll look at how to deploy some web apps. I'll do an asp.net web app on Windows, and then I'll do a node web app from a Mac except I'll use Git to deploy it just to give you a taste of what you can accomplish in just a few minutes with Microsoft Azure. So here we are in the Azure portal. On the left navigation pane here you can see the different services that are offered by Azure. If I click New, I've got lots of categorized options from virtual machines, web apps, mobile apps, API apps, databases of all kinds from SQL to NoSQL, Azure storage, and Redis Cache. I can look at things like Microsoft Cognitive Services, do machine learning, start thinking about the Internet of Things, build my own media empire. It's totally up to me. If I click on marketplace, there's actually thousands of options from third parties across many different vendors. The Azure portal is customizable. Each one of these individual squares can be resized and moved around. So I can build my own personal dashboard. I can look at all of my resources, pick a specific one, see all the details about that web application, and then even right click on an individual piece and pin that back to my larger dashboard. Those charts can individually be changed. Every chart is interactive; everything is customizable. And I can even have multiple dashboards. Microsoft Azure is a lot more than just Windows. You can run Ubuntu, Red Hat, virtual machine scale sets of any size. Web apps on Azure support more than just .net. They support Java, PHP, Node.JS, Python. I can run a WordPress, Umbraco, June Lug, Drupal. I can do continuous deployment with Git, TFS, GitHub, and more. Just jumping into Visual Studio here, you can see that I can manage all of my different Azure resources within Visual Studio. So I can choose the portal, or I can choose my IDE. I'm going to say New Project and make a quick asp.net web application. I'll right click in the solution explorer and say Publish and pick Azure App Service. I'll put a new web application in west U.S. We'll make the Hey, Welcome to Azure website. My web application has been created. I'll hit Publish to start that process. My web application is being deployed directly from within Visual Studio up into Azure. Here it goes. And now I've got an asp.net MVC application running here in Azure live. So that's an asp.net app from Visual Studio. I could have also used Git or GitHub. Let's switch over to a Mac and try something interesting. Here we are on my Mac. I'll switch over to the command line. I've got a little express application here written in Node. So here's my app on GitHub. Within the portal here, I'll make a new web app. Now, I want to deploy to this web app from GitHub. I'll go to Deployment Options. I can pick any of these places. I'll pick GitHub. I'll pick MyNodeApp on the master branch and hit OK. Azure's now going to use Git to deploy MyNodeApp directly into this web application. Here's the fetch happening. Now our app's deployed. Let's visit it. And there's my Express app deployed from GitHub directly into Azure. Here I've got MyNodeApp deployed from my Mac via GitHub and my asp.net app deployed from visual studio on a Windows machine both running in Azure, both being managed from within the Azure portal. I hope you have as much fun with Microsoft Azure as we did building it.