What is the difference between Azure Portal and Azure Preview Portal?

Question

It's been a while since Azure Classic portal is transformed into New Azure portal.

Azure Preview Portal (http://preview.portal.azure.com) is introduced on Jan 2017. It is still accessible by everyone.

I'm wondering if there is any special difference between Normal Azure Portal (http://portal.azure.com ) and Preview Azure Portal (http://preview.portal.azure.com) ?

I think most of the public preview azure services have been released in the normal Azure Portal itself. So is there is any need to go for preview.portal.Azure.com?

Answer 1

The Azure preview portal is for preview features of the portal and not specifically for previews of new Azure services. Previews of new Azure services should show up in both portal.azure.com and preview.portal.azure.com

Answer 2

Funcionality-wise there shouldn't be a difference; preview, beta, or other pre-release services, features or regions should also show up in the regular portal (explicitly mentioning 'preview').

However if you want to preview features specific to the portal's interface, use the Azure Preview Portal.

Answer 3

So the difference is, newest releases (including to bugs) go to preview, first.

When Azure portal is having problems, like being unable list any of your resources, Microsoft support will direct you to preview portal, to see if the problem persists, there. When they do releases, like bug fixes, they hit preview portal first. In my case, preview portal was able to work, so I could recover my VM, and regular portal came back not long after.