Create and Configure Azure VM for Todo App

I won't be going through every single option in this walkthrough or it would be extremely lengthy. The tutor will talk more about these options as they demonstrate it on a first walkthrough. However if you want to find out more information about any of these options, of course you can use the Copilot button which is on the menu bar at the top. Or you can use your favourite search engine. Some of the options should seem familiar to you now that you have studied for the AZ 900. Hopefully these labs will start to tie the theory with the practice

You will likely have another subscription details here at this point, but do not worry as it always fills the most suitable subscription in with the default.

As we create a Virtual Machine resource Azure will automatically create some additional resources such as a Virtual Network and a Network Security Group. (NSG) They will all be grouped together under this resource group so that it makes them easier for us to manage in the future.

This is the name of the virtual machine. Again you can see what I called mine, however you are free to call it any sensible name.

You can also see at this point that I selected UK West and that I said that no infrastructure redundancy was required.

The virtual machine image that it will use for the operating system is Ubuntu Server 24.04. This is a reasonable operating system image to use for our virtual machine and is very common.

Public and private keys to access our virtual machine is more secure than using Passwords. You can see I have left the username as azureuser and I've given my key a name of my initial and first name (srich)

We need to configure the virtual machine so that it will accept web traffic from the public Internet. For this proof of concept we will use HTTP port 80

We can see here on this screen shot that the OS disk type Is set as Premium SSD LRS. This will cost me $6.39 per month. I want to save some costs so I'm going to select the second option from this drop down box.

We will require one of these so that our users who are using our app can connect to our virtual machine. We could if we wanted also set up azure DNS. but for this proof of concept and walkthrough I won't

Again, any sensible name is OK.

(it's cheaper and does all we need). Don't worry if it's not available. In the process of creating this guide, sometimes it was available for me and other times it wasn't!

(it's cheaper and does all we need)

Your costs may be slightly different if you are running in a different region or maybe selected slightly different options.

Once we click this button then it will start to provision the resources it needs In order to create our virtual machine and associated other resources

You must download your private key which will be downloaded to your Downloads folder. Do not lose this as if you did you would potentially lose Access to your virtual machine. You would normally use your Private key if using another SSH client, but to keep things simple, we'll use the SSH client built into the Cloud Shell.

In order to administer and set up our virtual machine we will use the Azure CLI, or more specifically we will be using SSH over Azure CLI. this allows us to do all of the administration through our web browser, although experts and professionals would probably use another option such as a native SSH client

Python comes installed as default with our Ubuntu OS image. But it doesn't come with Flask, which is the library/module we are using the create our web app with Python. So, we need to install it.

Type: "sudo apt install python3-flask" At the prompt. No quotes needed!

It will then confirm that you want to install the package. Press enter or enter Y and press enter.

type "git clone" and then press CTRL-SHIFT-V to paste the copied git link in. Then press enter.

We now need to navigate Into the folder where the application is. You can see here I use cd and the name of the directory to navigate into the directory. I then use the next command sudo python3 app.py [PRESS ENTER] which starts the application running.

This can be seen in the main portal window above the Cloud shell.
We want to see if our app is alive and active on the IP address.

Congratulations you have successfully set up an application inside a virtual machine which is accessible on the Internet by its public IP address.

Don't forget that you will pay for the use of the virtual machine resources whilst the virtual machine is running. You should ensure you remember to shut down the virtual machine when not using as because in a shutdown mode it will cost you less. When you are completely done with the resources you should delete the resource group which of course will delete all the resources inside it and will incur no costs at all!