12 Resources every Azure developer should know
Here I’m listing 12 resources, in no particular order, which I find to be very helpful during my work as a Microsoft Azure architect and developer.
Azure Architect Center
The Architect Center is Microsoft’s Official center for guidance, blueprints and best practices for building solutions with Azure. Use it to plan your networks and application tiers on Azure and get a ton of diagrams and best practices concerning autoscaling, caching, data partitioning and API design.
You can download many of the diagrams as Microsoft Visio file, to use in your own projects.
Azure Solutions
Find sample architectures, partner resources and answers for the business challenges you might face on Azure. This includes specific guidance for different industries and a migration center to help you create a hybrid cloud or migrate your on-premise infrastructure to Azure.
Azure Tips and Tricks
Tips and Tricks is a large and quickly expanding collection of tips, code samples, videos and live streams. It’s hosted on GitHub, so you can contribute, or clone the repository.
Created by Michael Crump at Microsoft. Follow him on twitter here.
Azure Overview
Get a handy overview of all Azure services, organized by category. This includes Public Preview and links to the documentation for each service.
Created by Microsoft Azure MVP Barry Luijbregts. Follow him on twitter here.
Azure Quickstart Templates
You use the Resource Manager to deploy and manage services in Azure. Quickstart Templates is a community gallery containing more than 800 declarative templates, which you can use in the Resource Manager, to easily deploy (a set of) resources repeatedly.
Azure Updates
Read daily news about Azure service updates, new products, changes in pricing, upcoming developments, region availability and more.
Azure Status
View the health status of all Azure services worldwide and almost in real time, to see which issues might affect your deployments.
Azure Friday
Watch a new video every Friday, featuring Scott Hanselman and friends at Microsoft, about a wide range of Azure products. These bite-size videos get to the point and are mostly from a developer/engineer standpoint. Often featuring services that are still in preview, they’re ideal to stay ahead of the curve.
Follow Scott Hanselman on twitter here.
Channel 9
Channel 9 is an online community that was founded a lot of years ago, by a couple of developers at Microsoft. It contains loads of videos, screencasts, interviews, discussions and blogs. Browse the Azure section to find how-to’s and to stay on top of the latest changes.
Learn Azure
Get hands-on learning to acquire the Azure skills you need. Follow different paths to get Microsoft certified, or just to expand your knowledge. You can find free guides including labs, but also paid instructor-led training.
Postman
Use the free Postman tool to quickly test Azure (and self-created or other) REST API’s. It supports workspaces, collections, sessions, variables, scripts and automated testing, but is in its core very easy to use.
There are several GitHub repositories with Postman collections for specific Azure API’s, to save you a lot of work. Just search for ‘GitHub Azure API Postman collection’ in your favorite search engine (for Google: click here).
To round up, here are some more twitter accounts about Azure that I’m following:
- @Azure
- @AzurePortal
- @AzureFunctions
- @AzureCosmosDB
- @AzurePodcast
- @azurefriday
- @AzureDevOps
- @AzureAutomation
- @AzureSupport
- @gregor_suttie
Read part 2 here.
Thanks for reading!