Deploying to Azure requires an Azure account. If you do not already have an Azure account, you can create a free account at signup.azure.com. The Azure free account includes the following:

• Free access to Azure products for 12 months
• A credit to spend for the first 30 days
• Access to more than 25 products that are always free

Sign-up requires a phone number, a credit card, and a Microsoft or GitHub account. The credit card information is required for identity verification. You won't be charged for any services until you upgrade to a paid subscription. If you do not have a Microsoft or GitHub account, you can create a free Microsoft account instead when prompted to sign in during account creation. After your account is created, you are taken to the Azure Portal (see Figure A.1).

The Azure Portal is the online interface for managing your account and all the resources you provision on Azure. You can access the Azure Portal at any time by visiting portal.azure.com. As resources are used, the total credits available for your account decreases according to the resource's service plan. Azure provides six pricing tiers:

• Free—Intended to be used for development and testing purposes
• Shared—Intended to be used for development and testing purposes
• Basic—Designed for apps that have lower traffic requirements and don't need advanced autoscale and traffic management features
• Standard—Designed for running production workloads
• Premium—Designed to provide enhanced performance for production apps
• Isolated—Designed to run mission-critical workloads that are required to run in a virtual network

To learn more about pricing, visit azure.microsoft.com/pricing/.

Azure products are referred to as services. One exception is the Subscriptions service, which is not an Azure product. Rather, it is a resource for monitoring costs and billing. To access the Subscriptions service, search for subscriptions in the search bar at the top of the portal (see Figure A.2).

The Overview page for the Subscriptions service provides the remaining balance for your account credits (see Figure A.3).

At a minimum, all Azure resources require the following:

• Subscription—Users can have multiple Azure subscriptions and/or access to multiple subscriptions (such as those belonging to an organization). Each subscription populates in a drop-down list. Select the subscription in which the resource should be created.
• Name—The name must be unique. However, whether the name must be globally unique across Azure is dependent on the scope of the resource.
• Resource Group—A resource group groups multiple resources together so they can be managed as a single entity.
• Service Plan—The service plan determines the rate at which your Azure account is charged per resource usage. All pricing tiers follow a “pay-as-you-go” model.
• Location—The location, also referred to as a region, is a set of data centers deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network. The location is selected based on where users of your app reside. You also have the option to deploy across multiple regions. Some Azure services are not available in all regions. To explore resources available by region, visit azure.microsoft.com/global-infrastructure/services/.

Because the project examples elsewhere in this book create billable resources, it is suggested to delete the respective resource group to avoid incurring ongoing costs. To do so, first navigate to the Azure Portal (portal.azure.com). Next, select Resource Groups, followed by the resource used for the web app. On the Resource Group page, select the Delete Resource Group command (see Figure A.4).

For more information about Azure, visit azure.microsoft.com.