What are the Azure Tools?

Microsoft Azure is an environment developed for businesses that can be used to manage apps, services, and solutions built on the Azure platform.

Here we will discuss the top ten Azure tools which can assist professionals undergoing Azure training for certification and also companies in optimizing their businesses.

Microsoft Azure Tools

1.Azure Storage Explorer

Running on Windows, macOS, and Linux, Azure Storage Explorer is an application that helps you in managing the contents of your storage account efficiently by effectively using its graphical user interface. You can create, delete, edit, and view the resources in your store using this tool. The storage resources array includes blobs, queues, Cosmos DB, and Data Lake. Azure Storage Explorer also enables you to manage your virtual machine disks very easily. Alongside it also helps in managing and configuring cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) rules.

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2.AzCopy

It is no fun copying data to and from the Azure platform. AzCopy comes handy in managing this job as its light-weight command line is used to allow users to move their data into and out of their Azure storage account. This also works with blobs, tables, and files. AzCopy works on both Windows and Linux, given that you need the best performance to transfer a more significant chunk of Azure data speedily and proficiently.

3.Azure Pricing Calculator

The free web-based Azure tool helps in calculating the price of Microsoft Azure features based on the different solutions built with a different configuration. This tool is handy when you desire to purchase an Azure product, and you need to find the cost of the product through calculation set on the various configuration. You get an indicative price of the products, helping you in estimating the cost of Azure solution for your business, clearing the undefined doubts.

4.Microsoft Certification Test Tool for Azure Certified Virtual Machines

Microsoft Azure is not just a cloud platform to provide solutions for organizational goals. It is a dynamic environment that is used to upload a pre-configured application for the Azure Marketplace to optimize your cloud business. The Microsoft Certification Test Tool for Azure Certified Virtual Machines is a Microsoft application that examines your virtual machine to confirm it can run efficiently on the Azure platform. The tool is ideally designed to provide an assessment of compliance to technical requirements, following the Azure Certified program, and it possesses a wizard-style interface that has an automation and questionnaire section, which assesses the virtual machine image characteristics. After the tool runs successfully and passes all the required tests, you will need to submit the results. After that, your image to Microsoft Azure will categories your solution as Azure Certified.

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5.Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source automation server that is used by developers to build, automate, run, manage, and deploy their projects. In this fast-growing digital world, companies are increasingly building apps and updating them quickly and frequently. This is seen as the main competitive advantage for organizations that are running in the digital age today. To meet the expectation of the users and industry, often, constant integrations are organized by software developers. This practice of bringing multiple independent works of development code together at one place into a shared repository ensures the high standards and best practices of development that helps in creating enhanced solutions through processes like revision control and automated testing.

Microsoft Azure provides you with full support and integration of Jenkins and allows you to deploy a Jenkins server on the Azure environment. It is used to automate your development processes and builds with continuous integration.

6.Azure App Service Migration Assistant

The Azure App Service Migration Assistant enables you to migrate your on-premise IIS web application to the cloud environment. Developed by Microsoft, it helps in analyzing an IIS installation and finds out which are the websites that are hosted on the instance can migrate to the Azure environment. The tool also detects all the web elements and finds out which one can be relocated or are not maintained on the Azure platform. Once the analysis is over, the tool creates web apps and databases by default. If your websites are not compatible, the readiness assessment suggests the requirement of additional configuration or design changes.

7.Chef

The Chef is an open-source configuration management tool that enables you to automate your IT infrastructure. The most visible of all the benefits that organizations achieve by migrating to the cloud environment is the ability to scale on demand. But scaling processes and structure can be complicated, more so if the configuration is distinct for different fragments of the solution.

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With Chef, users can apply ‘recipes’ to configure settings through a script, which is then installed in all the right components of a solution. This standardizes the process across all parts of a solution, providing a stable configuration context for scalability but also helps in the easiness and efficiency of an IT environment.

8.Puppet

Puppet, like Chef, is an open-source software configuration management tool of the Microsoft Azure platform. While Chef uses ‘recipes,’ Puppet uses ‘manifests’ to meet the standardization of automation across an infrastructure configuration solution. Moreover, Chef users are required to write their ‘recipes’ using a pure-Ruby domain-specific language (DSL) while Puppet ‘manifests’ are created with the use of its declarative language. Both tools provide similar features. Both Chef and Puppet on Azure delivers the DevOps capability that businesses would require to manage their Azure configuration efficiently.

9.Ansible

Though Ansible is newer than Chef and Puppet, it is very much like them. It is another open-source DevOps tool that automates software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. However, it is not as mature as the other two configuration automation tools. With a few unique features, Ansible uses an agentless architecture, making it a real competitor in the DevOps tool space. Ansible ‘playbooks’ on Azure can help you automate the Azure environment that can further assist you in managing virtual machines, networks, and containers.

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10.Terraform

Terraform is another DevOps tool like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, all of which assist in automating configuration management of IT environments. Terraform write plan, and create infrastructure in code to add the additional feature of orchestration. This functionality helps you provision your servers automatically, which is not allowed by other similar tools. Terraform code on Azure can unfailingly standardize, configure, automate, and maintain your whole Azure environments.

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