With the classic Azure system management, you could previously manage only one resource on the Azure platform at the same time. But what about more complex applications, as are common today? The infrastructure of today's applications typically consists of several components - a virtual machine, a storage account, a virtual network, a web app, a database, a database server, or a third-party service. To manage such complex applications, with the first preview of the Azure management portal 3.0, the concept of resource groups was introduced.

You now see your components no longer as separate entities, but as related and interdependent parts of a single entity. So you will be able to manage all the resources of your application simultaneously.

As an instrument for this type of management, the Azure resource manager (and the Azure resource manager tools) was introduced, and can be accessed via a variety of different technologies and interfaces. These access...

In this section, I would like to give you a brief overview of the functionalities of the Azure resource manager. The list, however, is only a selection and is limited to the most frequently used features. You will find detailed information on the use of the features in the following sections of this chapter.

Let us have a look at the list:

We now know that the Azure resource manager serves as the technical base for the provision of resources. How are we going to continue? First, we will deal with the basic workflows in Azure resource manager. Then, in the second part, we will look at working with templates.

Before we begin, I want to introduce some very important facts that are important for all workflows:

OK, let's start...

The Creating an Azure resource group workflow is the first in a series of basic workflows, but also the most important. Why? Simple answer: an Azure resource group is the central element of the Azure resource manager concept. Without an existing resource group, nothing works, and I mean not only individual services, but your complete Azure subscription. To create an Azure resource group, perform the following steps:

We have just learned how to create an Azure resource group. Now we'll fill the new resource group with life and add a resource. To complete this process, the Azure platform has a total of three possible approaches. I will now introduce you to them one by one.

For all approaches, I will show the necessary work steps on the example of adding an Azure storage account. But note that the description of the procedure applies also to all other resource types in the same or slightly modified form.

First approach - adding a storage account to your Azure resource group

To add a storage account to your Azure resource group, perform the following steps:

1. Open your Azure management portal at https://portal.azure.com.
2. In the portal, click on New, then click on Data + Storage, and then click on Storage account:

3. On the Create storage account blade, type a unique name for the storage account you are creating in the Name textbox. If the name is unique, you will see a...

We have just learned how to create an Azure resource group, and how to add an Azure resource. What we are still missing? Short answer: we still need a way to organize our resources logically, for example, for the calculation of cost or for a targeted tracking.

The Azure resource manager offers a solution for this—Azure resource tags. Azure resource tags are any key/value pairs that appear useful to describe a resource.

Let's see an example:

Once you have defined a resource tag, you can use this as a filter in Azure PowerShell or in the Azure Billing APIs (Azure Usage API, Azure RateCard API). Up to 15 tags can be defined per resource.

I will show you the necessary work steps on the example of tagging an Azure storage account, but note that the description of the procedure applies to all other resource types in the same form: