Working with Azure and cloud platforms daily means having the right resources at your fingertips. I’ve compiled the most useful links I reference constantly—pricing calculators, documentation, tools, communities, and productivity enhancers that make cloud engineering more efficient.
Bookmark this page. You’ll reference it more often than you think.
Pricing & Cost Management
Understanding and predicting cloud costs is critical. These calculators and tools help you estimate, monitor, and optimize spending.
Azure Pricing Calculator
The official Azure pricing calculator. Essential for estimating costs before deployment. Configure services, regions, support levels, and get detailed breakdowns. Not perfect (doesn’t capture every nuance), but it’s your starting point for budgeting.
Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
Compare on-premises infrastructure costs versus Azure. Input your current datacenter specs (servers, storage, networking, labor) and get migration cost projections. Useful for building business cases and migration proposals.
Azure Cost Management
Direct link to Cost Management in Azure Portal. Monitor actual spending, set budgets, create alerts, analyze cost trends. If you’re not checking this regularly, you’re probably overspending.
Azure Retail Prices API
Programmatic access to Azure pricing data. Build custom cost calculators, automate pricing analysis, or integrate pricing into your infrastructure-as-code validation.
AWS Pricing Calculator
For multi-cloud environments or AWS comparisons. Similar functionality to Azure’s calculator. Useful when evaluating workload placement across clouds.
Official Documentation & Learning
Microsoft’s documentation is comprehensive. These are the highest-value starting points.
Microsoft Learn
Official learning platform with free courses, hands-on labs, and certification paths. Covers Azure, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and more. The Azure learning paths are excellent for structured learning.
Azure Architecture Center
Reference architectures, best practices, design patterns, and cloud design guidance. Start here when designing new solutions. The architecture patterns and anti-patterns sections are gold.
Azure Well-Architected Framework
Five pillars: Reliability, Security, Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency. Framework for reviewing architectures and making design decisions. Every solution should be evaluated against this.
Azure Updates
Official Azure updates feed. New service announcements, preview features, deprecations, and breaking changes. Subscribe to relevant categories to stay current.
Service Health & Status
Know what’s broken before your users tell you.
Azure Status
Global Azure service health dashboard. Check active incidents, planned maintenance, and historical outages. First place to check when something seems wrong.
Azure Service Health (Portal)
Personalized service health alerts for your specific Azure subscriptions and regions. Configure alerts to get notifications when services you use are impacted.
Microsoft 365 Status
Service health for Microsoft 365 services (Entra ID, Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams). Entra ID outages affect Azure authentication, so this matters for cloud infrastructure too.
Developer & DevOps Tools
Tools that make cloud development and operations more productive.
Azure DevOps Services
Microsoft’s DevOps platform. Repos, Pipelines, Boards, Artifacts, Test Plans. Tightly integrated with Azure for CI/CD.
Azure Portal
The main Azure management interface. Bookmark with portal.azure.com for fastest access.
Azure Cloud Shell
Browser-based shell with Azure CLI and PowerShell pre-installed. Quick access to Azure commands without local setup.
Azure Resource Explorer
Browse your Azure resources as JSON. See the raw ARM API representations. Useful for understanding resource properties and troubleshooting deployments.
Azure Speed Test
Test upload/download speeds to Azure regions. Latency measurements, storage speed tests, CDN performance checks. Helps with region selection decisions.
Microsoft Graph Explorer
Interactive tool for testing Microsoft Graph API queries. Essential for identity, Microsoft 365, and Intune integrations.
Infrastructure as Code
Managing infrastructure declaratively requires good references and tools.
Terraform Azure Provider Documentation
Complete reference for the Azure Resource Manager (azurerm) Terraform provider. Every resource type, argument, attribute. The most-referenced documentation when writing Terraform.
Azure Verified Modules (AVM)
Official Microsoft-supported Terraform and Bicep modules. Production-ready, tested, maintained. Use these instead of writing everything from scratch.
Bicep Documentation
Azure’s domain-specific language for ARM templates. Simpler than JSON ARM templates, native Azure support. Good alternative to Terraform for Azure-only deployments.
ARM Template Reference
Complete Azure Resource Manager template reference. Every resource provider, API version, property. Detailed but comprehensive.
Pulumi Azure Documentation
Infrastructure as code using actual programming languages (TypeScript, Python, Go, C#). Alternative to HCL and Bicep if you prefer general-purpose languages.
Security & Compliance
Security resources and compliance frameworks for Azure.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Centralized security management and threat protection. Security recommendations, compliance dashboards, vulnerability assessments. Start here for security posture.
Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC)
Security vulnerabilities, security updates, security advisories. Subscribe for security incident notifications.
Azure Compliance Offerings
Azure compliance certifications (ISO, SOC, FedRAMP, HIPAA, GDPR, etc.). Documentation on which services comply with which frameworks.
CIS Azure Foundations Benchmark
Industry-standard security configuration baseline for Azure. Comprehensive hardening guidelines. Many automated scanning tools reference CIS benchmarks.
Azure Security Benchmarks
Microsoft’s security best practices for Azure. Similar to CIS but Microsoft-maintained. Integrated into Defender for Cloud recommendations.
Community & Support
Learning from others and getting help when stuck.
Azure Reddit (r/AZURE)
Active community discussing Azure topics, troubleshooting issues, sharing architectures. Good for “has anyone else seen this?” questions.
Microsoft Q&A
Official Microsoft community forums. Better than old MSDN/TechNet forums. Microsoft employees actively respond. Tag questions properly for faster answers.
Stack Overflow - Azure Tag
Massive knowledge base of Azure technical questions and answers. Search before asking—someone probably already solved your problem.
Azure GitHub Repository
Official Microsoft Azure GitHub organization. Source code for SDKs, samples, tools, and open-source projects. Issues and discussions for many Azure services.
Terraform Azure Provider GitHub
Issue tracking, feature requests, provider source code. Report bugs, track fixes, understand provider behavior.
Useful Third-Party Tools
Non-Microsoft tools that enhance Azure workflows.
AzAdvertizer
Comprehensive Azure governance reference. Azure Policy definitions, RBAC roles, resource providers, API versions. Searchable, filterable, incredibly useful.
AzGovViz
Azure governance visualization tool. Generates HTML reports showing management group hierarchies, subscriptions, policies, RBAC, costs. Essential for understanding complex Azure tenants.
Azure Quick Review (AzQR)
Azure resource review tool. Scans subscriptions and generates compliance/security reports. Identifies misconfigurations and improvement opportunities.
PSRule for Azure
Infrastructure-as-code validation rules for Azure. Pre-deployment scanning of ARM templates, Bicep, and Terraform. Catches configuration issues before deployment.
Cloud Architecture & Design
Resources for designing well-architected cloud solutions.
Cloud Design Patterns
Catalog of proven cloud design patterns. Circuit Breaker, CQRS, Event Sourcing, Retry, etc. Solutions to common architectural challenges.
Azure Architecture Icons
Official Microsoft Azure icon set for architecture diagrams. SVG format, regularly updated. Essential for creating professional diagrams.
Diagrams.net (draw.io)
Free diagramming tool with Azure stencils. Create architecture diagrams, network diagrams, flow charts. Saves to cloud storage providers.
Certification & Career
Official Microsoft certification paths and exam information.
Microsoft Certifications
Complete certification catalog. Role-based certifications (Administrator, Developer, Architect, Security Engineer, etc.). Clear learning paths from fundamentals to expert level.
Azure Certification Poster
Visual certification path diagram. Shows fundamentals, associate, and expert level certifications with prerequisites.
Regional Availability & Capabilities
Understanding where services are available and what features are supported.
Azure Geographies
Azure regions, geographies, availability zones. Understand data residency and compliance boundaries.
Products Available by Region
Service availability matrix by region. Critical for multi-region planning and disaster recovery design.
Azure IP Ranges and Service Tags
Downloadable JSON file of Azure IP address ranges. Updated weekly. Useful for firewall rules and network security group configurations.
Monitoring & Observability
Tools and resources for monitoring Azure environments.
Azure Monitor Documentation
Complete monitoring platform documentation. Metrics, logs, alerts, dashboards, Application Insights, Log Analytics.
KQL (Kusto Query Language) Reference
Query language for Azure Monitor Logs, Application Insights, Sentinel. Essential for log analysis and building alerts.
Azure Monitor Query Playground
Practice KQL queries against sample data. Learn query syntax without affecting production logs.
Migration & Assessment
Planning and executing cloud migrations.
Azure Migrate
Centralized migration hub. Discovery, assessment, and migration tools for servers, databases, web apps, virtual desktops.
Azure Database Migration Guide
Step-by-step database migration guidance. Source and target selection, assessment tools, migration strategies.
Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure
End-to-end cloud adoption guidance. Strategy, planning, readiness, migration, governance, management. Essential for enterprise Azure deployments.
API References & SDKs
Programmatic access to Azure services.
Azure REST API Reference
Complete REST API documentation for all Azure services. Every endpoint, request format, response schema.
Azure CLI Reference
Command-line interface documentation. Every command, subcommand, parameter, example.
Azure PowerShell Reference
PowerShell module documentation for Azure. Cmdlet reference, examples, authentication methods.
Azure SDKs GitHub
Official Azure SDKs for multiple languages (.NET, Python, Java, JavaScript, Go). Source code, samples, issues.
Final Thoughts
This list grows and changes. Azure releases new services constantly, community tools evolve, and documentation improves.
The most valuable resources are the ones you actually use. Start with pricing calculators, documentation, and status pages. Add community resources when you get stuck. Layer in IaC references, security tools, and third-party utilities as your Azure practice matures.
Bookmark this page. Share it with your team. The cloud engineering community benefits when we share our reference collections.