Azure Mobile App — Managing your Azure Services on Mobile Devices

Cloud computing is all about flexibility and mobility. Managing your infrastructure, checking the status of your resources and identifying problems should be as adoptable as using the cloud. On the other side, we limit ourselves to do our work mainly with laptops. In this little article, we will do our cloud business with our mobile phone. What could be more flexible than that?

Microsoft Azure in App Store

Microsoft Azure is growing every day and provides us with a wide range of infrastructure, platform and service offerings. In addition, Microsoft published a mobile Azure App for Android and iOS. The two main functionalities are monitoring your resources and using the integrated Cloud Shell to manage them. And you can do some awesome stuff with it!

Let’s get started with downloading the app from App Store! — I am using an iPhone 10 with iOS 12.

All resources overview

Now, we open the app and login to our subscription. You don’t have a subscription yet? Check it out for free: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/free/

We start with a look on all our resources. A bit empty here. Let’s change that and create some resources!

Missing a storage account?

Tap on Cloud Shell to connect to terminal. To use this, we need a storage account. But this can be created easily. Simply press the Create button, with your subscription selected.

Now, we can choose between PowerShell and Bash. Both options provide the same functionality most of the time. Commands are quite similar. So, we give PowerShell a chance and create a VM in Azure with our mobile phone.

Create a resource group

To start with, we create a resource group for our VM. Resource groups help to keep order and organize infrastructure with the same lifecycle. We call it AzureMobile and locate it to Europe West. Azure is available all around the globe, so use the region you like. After entering the command, tap the return button.

New-AzureResourceGroup -Name "AzureMobile" -Location "westeurope"

Report after creating a resource group

Immediately, we see our success!

Deploy a VM with a bit of code

New-AzVM -ResourceGroupName "AzureMobile" -Name "AzureMobileVM" -Location westeurope

We are ready to deploy our VM and give it some configuration of our likes. Mind your fingers now or prewrite the commands and use the Paste button in the upper right corner.

For sure, you can change location and names suitable to your needs and desire.

Report of the new VM

Deployment takes only some minutes and we get some information about our VM back.

Time to close our Cloud Shell session. Press the X button in the upper right corner.

All resources created

Let’s have a look in our resource view. Refreshing it and we see everything which Azure created for us.

Tap on the newly created resource group to get more details.

Detailed view on resource group

Here, we can get an overview of our resource group and check for errors. This will provide us useful information at any time and helps us to monitor our resources. The faster we are informed and act, the lesser damage will be caused.

Next, we tap on our VM!

Overview of new VM

The dashboard of our VM looks good so far.

Monitoring the VM

To get more information on performance, we can have a look at Metrics, with the See All button.

With only little effort, you are able to get an overview of our Azure subscription and create a VM. PowerShell or Bash can be used to manage your resources and extend the possibilities beyond monitoring. In the next article, we will connect to our VM from our mobile device, using Microsoft-Remotedesktop App.

This article was created based on my daily job at Cluster Reply. We build and integrate holistic solutions using Microsoft technologies. If you have questions, ideas or are looking for an awesome job — feel free to contact me.