With Azure Stack, you will get an administrative portal, which is lacking with Microsoft Public Azure, as there Microsoft is running Azure. Azure Stack will be operated by your operations team. Therefore, Azure Stack provides an administrative portal that is accessible through the following URL (using ASDK, as with the multi-node environment, is something you have to decide during the setup): https://adminportal.local.azurestack.external.
Depending on which scenario Azure Stack has been set up with (connected or disconnected mode), you either have to authenticate against Azure AD or as Cloudadmin:
This portal is used to fulfil the following tasks:
- Manage the infrastructure (including system health, updates, capacity, and so on)
- Populate the marketplace
- Create user subscriptions
- Create plans and offers
In Azure Stack, a plan is a way to group one or more services into a basic service plan; for example, you could create a plan that includes the compute, network, and storage resource providers. It gives a subscriber the ability to provision virtual machines by then. Resources can be budgeted using quotas. A quota can exist per resource.
An offer is a group of one or more plans to be presented to a customer.
After having created plans and offers, a user would have to subscribe to them. This could be done in two different ways:
- The cloud operator can create the subscription for a user in the administrative portal
- A tenant can subscribe to a public offer using the tenant portal
Now, let's have a look at the tenant portal, which is accessible using the following URL https://portal.local.azurestack.external/ (in ASDK; in multi-node environments it could be different). This is a screenshot of the tenant portal:
The tenant portal will be used to create resources (virtual machines or PaaS solutions) as a self-service portal.