If you’re developing applications that target Azure services (e.g. Web Apps, Functions, Storage), you’ll want to know about two powerful tools that come with Visual Studio 2017 and the Azure development workload:
Cloud Explorer is a tool window inside Visual Studio that lets you browse your Azure resources and perform specific tasks – like stop and start app service, view streaming logs, create storage items. Storage Emulator is a separate application to Visual Studio that provides a local simulation of the Azure storage services. It’s really handy for testing Functions that trigger from queues, blobs or tables. In this blog I’ll show you how you can develop development/Azure applications entirely locally – including the ability to interact with Azure storage – without ever needing an Azure subscription.
From:
blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2018/02/08/two-lesser-known-tools-for-local-azure-