Hands-On Linux Administration on Azure: Explore the essential Linux administration skills you need to deploy and manage Azure-based workloads

If you want to try all the examples in this chapter, you'll need at least a browser. For stability reasons, it's important to use a very recent version of a browser. Microsoft offers a list of supported browsers in the documentation on the Azure documentation website:

Based on personal experience, I recommend using Google Chrome or a browser based on a recent version of its engine, such as Vivaldi. 

You can do all the exercises in your browser, even the exercises involving the command line. In daily life, it's a better idea to use a local installation of the software; it's faster, easier to copy and paste code, and you can save history and the output from the commands. 

To start in Azure, the first thing you'll need is an account. Go to https://azure.microsoft.com and get yourself a free account to get started, or use the corporate account that is already in use. Another possibility is to use Azure with a Visual Studio Dev Essentials subscription, a Visual Studio subscription, or an Enterprise/Dev subscription. 

If you are using a free account, you'll get some credits to start, some of the popular services for a limited time, and some services that will stay free forever, such as the container service. You can find the most recent list of free services at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free. You won't be charged during the trial period, except for virtual machines that need additional licensing, but you do need a credit card to identify yourself.

Linux is everywhere, on many different devices, in many different environments. There are many different flavors. Why? The choice is yours, but what do you choose? There are any questions, and many different answers are possible. But one thing's for sure: in corporate environments, support is important.

After covering the the available Linux distributions in Azure and the level of support you can get, after setting up an environment where you can create a virtual machine, it's time to deploy our first virtual machine. 

Your first virtual machine

The resource group is created, a storage account is created in this resource group, and now you are ready to create your first Linux Virtual Machine in Azure.

In PowerShell use the following command:

New-AzureRmVM -Name "UbuntuVM" -Location westus `
  -ResourceGroupName MyResource1 -ImageName UbuntuLTS `
  -Size Standard_B1S

The cmdlet will prompt you to provide a username and password:

In Bash use the following command:

az vm create --name UbuntuVM --resource-group MyResource2 \
  --image UbuntuLTS --authentication-type password \
  --admin-username student –size Standard_B1S

This was very easy, but if you create a virtual machine instance this way, the number of options you can set is very limited. Many things are automatically...

The virtual machine is running, ready for you to log in remotely using the credentials (username and password) you provided during the deployment of your first virtual machine. Another, more secure method using SSH key pairs is available as well.

This chapter covered the first steps into the Microsoft Azure Cloud. And the first step always involves creating a new account or using an existing company account. With an account, you're able to log in and start discovering the Azure cloud.

In this chapter, the discovery of the Azure cloud was done within the Azure CLI command az, or via PowerShell; example by example, you learned more about the following:

Last, but not least: log into your Linux virtual machine, using SSH. The next chapter starts here, with a new journey: the Linux operating system

By no means is this chapter a tutorial on using PowerShell. But if you want a better understanding of the examples or learn more about PowerShell, I can recommend you reading the book Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripts (ISBN 9781787126305). I suggest that you start with second chapter Working with PowerShell and continue until at least fourth chapter Working with Objects in PowerShell.

You can find more then enough online documentation about using SSH. A very good start is the wikibook: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH.

There is also a very old book, SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide (ISBN 978-0596008956), which is still a valid source of information, especially for system engineers.