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Azure

Azure is a complete cloud platform that can host your existing applications and streamline new application development. Azure can even enhance on-premises applications. Azure integrates the cloud services that you need to develop, test, deploy, and manage your applications, all while taking advantage of the efficiencies of cloud computing.

By hosting your applications in Azure, you can start small and easily scale your application as your customer demand grows. Azure also offers the reliability that's needed for high-availability applications, even including failover between different regions. The Azure portal lets you easily manage all your Azure services. You can also manage your services programmatically by using service-specific APIs and templates.

Application hosting

Azure provides several cloud-based compute offerings to run your application so that you don't have to worry about the infrastructure details. You can easily scale up or scale out your resources as your application usage grows.

Azure offers services that support your application development and hosting needs. Azure provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to give you full control over your application hosting. Azure's Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings provide the fully managed services needed to power your apps. There's even true serverless hosting in Azure where all you need to do is write your code.

How to manage the applications and projects?

Azure provides a rich set of experiences for you to create and manage your Azure resources, applications, and projects—both programmatically and in the Azure portal.

Command-line interfaces and PowerShell

Azure provides two ways to manage your applications and services from the command line. You can use tools like Bash, Terminal, the command prompt, or your command-line tool of choice. Usually, you can do the same tasks from the command line as in the Azure portal—such as creating and configuring virtual machines, virtual networks, web apps, and other services.

  • Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI): Lets you connect to an Azure subscription and program various tasks against Azure resources from the command line.
  • Azure PowerShell: Provides a set of modules with cmdlets that enable you to manage Azure resources by using Windows PowerShell.

Azure portal

The Azure portal is a web-based application. You can use the Azure portal to create, manage, and remove Azure resources and services. It includes:

  • A configurable dashboard.
  • Azure resource management tools.
  • Access to subscription settings and billing information.

REST APIs

Azure is built on a set of REST APIs that support the Azure portal UI. Most of these REST APIs are also supported to let you programmatically provision and manage your Azure resources and applications from any Internet-enabled device. For the complete set of REST API documentation, see the Azure REST SDK reference.

APIs

  • .NET
  • Node.js
  • Java
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Go

What is GitHub Actions for Azure?

GitHub Actions helps you automate your software development workflows from within GitHub. You can deploy workflows in the same place where you store code and collaborate on pull requests and issues.

In GitHub Actions, a workflow is an automated process that you set up in your GitHub repository. You can build, test, package, release, or deploy any project on GitHub with a workflow.

Each workflow is made up of individual actions that run after a specific event (like a pull request) occur. The individual actions are packaged scripts that automate software development tasks.

With GitHub Actions for Azure, you can create workflows that you can set up in your repository to build, test, package, release, and deploy to Azure. GitHub Actions for Azure supports Azure services, including Azure App Service, Azure Functions, and Azure Key Vault.

GitHub Actions also include support for utilities, including Azure Resource Manager templates, Azure CLI, and Azure Policy.