Portal, Cloud Shell, CLI, PowerShell and Arc

Everything in Azure goes through Azure Resource Manager (more on that in the next lesson), but you can talk to it in several ways.

The Azure portal

The Azure portal is a web-based, unified console at portal.azure.com. You can:

• search for, create and manage every resource, from simple web apps to complex deployments,
• build, manage and monitor them, with customisable dashboards that show what matters to you,
• see costs, health and recommendations, and set accessibility options for the best experience.

The portal is built for resilience and continuous availability: it has a presence in every Azure datacenter, so it is not affected by an individual datacenter failure, and it updates continuously without maintenance downtime. It is the easiest place to start, but clicking is slow for repetitive work.

Azure Cloud Shell

Azure Cloud Shell is a browser-based command line, opened from the portal (or shell.azure.com). You choose a Bash or PowerShell experience, and it comes with Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell already installed and signed in with your Azure account, plus tools like Git and text editors. Nothing to install on your own computer; it even works from a tablet. Sessions are temporary, so files you want to keep go in an Azure file share that Cloud Shell mounts for you.

Azure CLI

The Azure CLI is a cross-platform command-line tool using az commands. Commands are grouped by service:

az group create --name rg-learn --location eastus
az vm list --output table
az storage account create --name stlearn2026 --resource-group rg-learn --sku Standard_LRS

It runs in Bash, PowerShell or Command Prompt, on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Azure PowerShell

Azure PowerShell is a set of PowerShell cmdlets (in the Az module) for managing Azure, using PowerShell's verb-noun style:

New-AzResourceGroup -Name rg-learn -Location eastus
Get-AzVM

Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell can do the same things; teams choose whichever matches their skills. Both are ideal for scripts and automation.

The Azure mobile app

The Azure mobile app (iOS and Android) lets you monitor resource health, get alerts, restart VMs and even open Cloud Shell from your phone.

Azure Arc

Azure Arc extends Azure management and governance to resources outside Azure, wherever they run: on-premises, at the edge, or in other clouds. Today Arc can manage:

• servers (physical machines and VMs, Windows or Linux),
• Kubernetes clusters,
• Azure data services running on your own infrastructure,
• SQL Server instances,
• virtual machines in VMware vSphere and other on-premises virtualisation platforms.

Once connected, those resources appear in the portal like Azure resources and you can:

• organise them with resource groups and tags,
• apply Azure Policy and RBAC,
• protect them with Microsoft Defender for Cloud,
• monitor them with Azure Monitor.