Cloud solutions are a combination of many single cloud services, like Azure Active Directory, Virtual Machines, Web Services, Databases and Storage Containers and more. With Azure Resource Manager this solutions can be handled as a group. This means, that the resources for the solution can be deployed, updated or deleted in a single, transactional coordinated operation.
All related resources for a solution are hold in a container and that is called a resource group. The resource group could include all of the resources for a solution, or only those resources that are logically grouped together. How to allocate resources to resource groups is a decision based on what makes the most sense for a organization. Those resource groups are the new concept in Azure that serves as the life-cycle boundary for all of its resources.
Azure Resource Manager Templates can be used for different environments such as testing, staging and production. After the deployment of the resources, Azure Resource Manager provides security, auditing, and tagging features to help with the management of the deployed resources.
If you want to find out more of Azure Resource Manager you can have a look at the Azure Resource Manager Overview by Tom FitzMacken here: Azure Resource Manager Overview
The new Azure Resource Manager Portal, or short the Azure Portal, is that all-in-one work-anywhere experience where to manage the above explained resource groups. It was built from the ground up and some time ago know as the Azure Preview Portal and puts now the applications at the center of the experience.
This unified hub radically simplifies building, deploying and managing cloud resources. Imagine a single, easy-to-use console built just for the user, teams and projects. It brings together all of the cloud resources, team members, and life-cycle stages of applications and provides the user with a centralized place to plan, develop, test, provision, deploy, scale, and monitor those applications. This approach can help teams embrace a BizDevOps culture by bringing all three, business, development and operations capabilities and perspectives together in a meaningful way.
The new portal allows each user to transform the portal home page (called the Startboard) into their own customized dashboard. Stay on top of the things that matter most by pinning them to the Startboard. Resize parts to show more or less data. Drill in for all the details. And see insights (and opportunities) across apps and resources.
