Revisit the new Azure Portal
The new Azure portal has been in preview mode for around 1 year now is it provides a totally different user experience. There have been several major update to the portal with recent announcements here. The feature updates have partially come from end users suggestions here.
After you login you can customise the appearance of the items on your portal home page with right clicks on the tiles and double clicks to change colors. Performance, Monthly Spend, and other items can be put into your portal home page.
Resource blades surface to show Azure resources like Websites, VMs, SQL Databases, etc. They are a common starting point or destination when you use the Azure portal. Creating a new Website you see the blades appear as you click to make adjustments. You can see the different Tiers and the costs are easily displayed.
Deploying a SharePoint Farm is a 5 minute task (automated provisioning will happen in the background). When making the SharePoint farm we have the options to create a new Domain Controller, set SQL customizations and again virtual server sizes.
With 1 click of Create, all required services are provisioned automatically. The portal home page shows my SharePoint Farm and my Website being created.
Once my Website is running and I select it, then from my Essentials Portal I can then natively run a console directly from the Azure Portal.
You can add additional parts to your console, via right clicking from the Essentials Portal.
Once SharePoint is running we can see all servers that were deployed simply by select the ‘create’ button.
The usage costs now show up in far more detail through this portal (assuming you have a paid subscription).
These features can help ease administration. For more information check out the following links.
http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/topics/management/
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/the-new-azure-management-portal-rocks