Azure portal (ARM model)

In 2014, Microsoft launched a new portal which follows a new model, called the ARM model. This portal can be accessed via the following URL https://portal.azure.com/.

This model depends on the concept of resource groups, which means you can group all your resources within a container, resulting in resources being deployed in parallel. As a result, you will not face the same problems as you did with the classic portal.

The following diagram describes the deployed resources through the ARM model:

Here are the benefits you will gain using this portal:

• Ability to manage your resources as a group instead of managing them separately.
• Use Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to control access to resources, so that you can assign permissions to a user on a resource or some resources but not to other resources (as it was in the classic portal).
• Use tags to organize and classify your resources, which can help you with billing. For example, you might want to monitor the billing of some resources that make up a solution, for example, a web server. By assigning a tag to the resources that make up that solution, you would be able to monitor its billing, and so on.
• Support the usability of JSON to deploy resources instead of using the portal.
  • Deploy resources in parallel instead of deploying them sequentially and waiting until every resource deployment finishes to deploy another one.
  • Specify dependencies during the deployment of resources. For example, a VM will not be created until a storage account and a virtual network are deployed because the VM VHD would need a place to be stored in and an IP Address from a virtual network./li>
  • Reuse the JSON template to deploy a solution with the same specifications.

• Resources with the same life cycle should be gathered in the same resource group.
• Resources in different regions can be in the same resource group.
• The resource cannot exist in multiple resource groups.
• A resource group supports RBAC, wherein a user can have access to some specific resources, but no access to others.
• Some resources can be shared across resource groups, such as storage accounts.
• ARM VMs can only be placed in ARM storage accounts.

When you open the Azure portal, it will look like the following screenshot: