What is Microsoft Azure?
Azure is a comprehensive set of cloud services that developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy, and manage applications through a global network of datacenters. Integrated tools, DevOps.
Why use Microsoft Azure?
- Scalability
- Cost
- Speed
- Security
- Availability
Server 2012 R2 Deployment:
Most of this set up process is to be done in a browser.
First you will need to sign up with Microsoft Azure, pretty straight forward process, except they ask for your phone number to “verify you identity”, which I find to be a little odd
After you’ve signed up and logged in, they direct you straight to the Azure control panel, click on “+ New”
Search for server 2012
And click “Create”
Only to find out that you’ll need to “Upgrade” your subscription
Here you’ll need to sign up for a free trial
And they wants your credit card info
You will have $200 worth of credit to use during the trial
Go back to the dashboard, find Server 2012 R2 and click “Create”
And configure some settings for the new server
“Name” = server name, “User name” = administrator name, and “resource group” is just a container in Azure for ease of management
Step 2, here you can decide the amount of hardware resources your server can have, Microsoft gives you some recommended pre-configured models to choose from, but in a free trial, you won’t be able to crank up the number of virtual CPUs and RAM anyway, I picked the first one.
Step 3, some network settings and miscellaneous stuff, the network part will be auto-filled, leave at default unless you need to change anything
Step 3 Cont.
Step 4, summary, if everything looks good, click “Create”. Note they charge $.014 per hour for this particular set up.
Wait for the deployment to finish, in my case it took less than 5 minutes
Once it is done, the server dashboard pops up, you can view the server status here, click on “Connect” to connect to the server, and a .rdp file will be downloaded, use it to establish a remote desktop connection to your server
Enter your administrator credentials
And that’s it, you are in.
Reference:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-azure/