Two types of Azure Portal and ASM vs ARM - What is the picture behind the curtains?

Question

I often get confused when people suggest me to go to older azure portal and sometimes to newer azure portal.

old portal- https://manage.windowsazure.com

New Portal- https://portal.azure.com

The UI as completely different. Even some features are available in old which are not available in New and vice versa. I really get confused when to use which one.

Is there any documentation or help from where I can refer when to use which one. Also I would like to understand why there are two portals. I mean the second one can be released once whole development task is completed for that.

Also, it is being said MS will be deprecating ASM and ARM will be the one coming in picture. Resource group will replace cloud service approach. This is confusing. Do we require change from Infrastructure perspective(as an admin) by us. The cmdlets we use in ASM will work the same or MS will come up with something new approach or some new PS or something else? It totally confuses me.

Answer 1

Part of your questions are answered here: manage.windowsazure.com vs. portal.azure.com.

Do we require change from Infrastructure perspective(as an admin) by us.

AFAIK, for the most part no. What Microsoft is doing is integrating it seamlessly. A good example is if you look at the preview portal, you will see things like Storage accounts and Storage accounts (classic) where classic refers to anything you create using ASM. Same is the deal with cloud services.

The cmdlets we use in ASM will work the same or MS will come up with something new approach or some new PS or something else?

Once ASM is removed, I doubt that the ASM cmdlets will work. Microsoft has already released PS Cmdlets for ARM. Please see this link for more details: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/documentation/articles/powershell-azure-resource-manager/.

It totally confuses me.

You're not alone :). As of today it is quite confusing with the whole ASM/ARM terminologies however IMHO moving towards ARM is a step in the right direction. Personally to me the best benefit of ARM is Role-based access control which allows me (as an admin) to grant granular permissions on Azure resources in my subscription to the users in my team.