This is one of those posts which is pending for a very long time. I was pretty excited when Azure Portal Preview was announced during BUILD2014. This portal will deeply enhance developer experience.

As a SQLServer person I was interested to explore more within the portal to see what in store for me, and here are some of the cool things which the portal had to offer me.

As soon as you login, the page welcomes you with some great information such as Service Status, Billing info etc.

If you interested to know about a service, there is great level of information which is made available in the portal.

If you drill down to the billing details, then you are provided with some nice stats.

You have the option to right click a particular view and you can pin it to the startboard( Yes, Windows8 theme is everywhere !)

You can even do customizations for the view which was added to the startboard.

I tried to create a SQLDatabase using the portal, and it allowed me to create a web edition one with 1GB size. (Remember this is still preview). Here are the steps

There are lot of things like creating VMs is not available in preview for now, but the layout looks neat.(Again, if you are a windows8 user, then you will love it !)

One thing really excited me was the view for storage. Everything was laid out nicely. Quite impressive !

Conclusion  :

I’m looking forward to this portal, and I’m pretty sure that it will add more value to everyone.

Keep watching this space for more.