Introduction

Setting up cloud infrastructure for projects can quickly become overwhelming if resources aren't properly organized. Azure offers a powerful way to group related services together using Resource Groups, acting as logical containers that simplify deployment, management, and teardown. Whether you're spinning up a virtual network, a VM, or a storage account, placing them under one group ensures seamless project lifecycle management.

In this post, we’ll walk through the foundational steps for preparing your Azure environment for a guided project: creating a resource group, provisioning a virtual network and subnet, launching a virtual machine, and deploying a storage account. These are essential cloud-building blocks — and understanding how to deploy them cleanly is key for any aspiring cloud engineer.

Architecture Overview

You’ll be provisioning the following resources:

• A new Resource Group (guided-project-rg) to contain all project resources.
• A Virtual Network (guided-project-vnet) with a single subnet.
• A basic Virtual Machine (guided-project-vm) with SSH access.
• An Azure Storage Account for storing project data.

Step 1: Create a Resource Group

To ensure easy cleanup and resource management, start by creating a dedicated resource group:

1. From the Azure Portal, search for Resource groups.
   

2. Click Create.
   

3. In the form, select Subscription, use your active Azure subscription.

4. Select Resource group name as guided-project-rg and Region leave as default.

5. Click Review + create, then Create.
   

💡 Tip: Before proceeding, take note of other resource groups. If a group like NetworkWatcherRG already exists, do not delete it later. It may be part of your environment's monitoring baseline.

Return to the Azure home screen to prepare for the next step.

Step 2: Create a Virtual Network and Subnet

Networking is the backbone of any cloud infrastructure. You’ll now create a private, isolated network for your resources.

1. Search for Virtual networks.
   

2. Click Create.
   

3. Set Resource group to guided-project-rg.

4. Set Name to guided-project-vnet.

5. Ensure Region is auto-filled to match your resource group.

6. Click Review + create.
   

7. Click Create.

8. Wait for deployment to complete, Click Go to resource.
   

9. Once deployment completes, return to Home.

Step 3: Deploy a Virtual Machine (VM)

Virtual Machines are essential for running workloads. We’ll deploy a basic Ubuntu Linux VM using SSH password authentication:

1. From the Azure Portal, search for Virtual machines.
   

2. Click Create > Virtual machine.
   

3. Set Resource group to guided-project-rg.

4. Set VM name to guided-project-vm.

5. Set Image to Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS (x64 Gen2).

6. Set Authentication type to Password.

7. Enter Username as guided-project-admin.

8. Enter a secure Password and record it somewhere safe.

9. Leave all other settings as default.

10. Click Review + create, then click Create.

11. After deployment completes, return to the Home page.

Step 4: Provision a Storage Account

Now, let’s add storage capabilities to your environment; ideal for logs, backups, or hosting static content.

1. From the Azure Portal, search for Storage accounts.
   

2. Click Create.

3. Set Resource group to guided-project-rg.

4. Enter a Storage account name using a unique, lowercase name (e.g., projstorage2025).

5. Click Review + create, then click Create.
   

6. Once deployment completes, your foundational infrastructure is ready.

Conclusion

By completing these steps, you’ve provisioned a clean and manageable project environment in Azure. Each resource is logically grouped and ready for secure configuration, networking, and deployment. This practice not only improves visibility and management but also lays a strong foundation for scaling up projects or tearing them down with minimal risk.

Whether you’re learning cloud basics or preparing for certification, mastering resource provisioning is a critical milestone and Azure makes it intuitive and powerful.