Microsoft today previewed its new Azure Portal, which will replace its current Azure management portal over time. This is more than just a redesign. It’s meant to make life for developers quite a bit easier and will integrate features from both Azure and Visual Studio, as well a AppInsights, Microsoft’s application- and user-level analytics service. The new portal will be live for developers who want to test it later this afternoon.
Microsoft’s Soma Somasegar noted when I spoke to him last week that Microsoft offers both the Azure Management Portal and its Visual Studio online tools. Between the two of them, developers get access to build services, load testing services, check analytics and the ability to manage their Azure instances, databases and other services.
For developers who are already building apps on the Azure platform, this new portal will give them an end-to-end solution for almost all of the tools they need to develop, deploy and manage their apps. It also frees them from having to switch between different online experiences. This should make DevOps quite a bit easier for developers.
One part of this new portal that developers at Build are especially excited about is the built-in code editor that allows them to easily make changes to their code online.
“One of the reasons we are excited about this is that we are thinking about application lifecycle management in an end-to-end way,” Somasegar told me. “With this portal, developers can now look at things in a holistic way as opposed to just being service-centric.” The reality today, he argues, is that modern apps use multiple services anyway, so Microsoft wants to give them a single place to, for example, do log analysis.
While Microsoft didn’t announce a timeframe for when it plans to release this update, Somasegar told me that the company plans to slowly migrate all of its users over to this platform.
