Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure is a cloud computing service operated by Microsoft for application management via Microsoft-managed data centers. It offers software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and it supports a wide range of programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both systems and programs made by Microsoft and those made by third parties.
Since it's creation, it has expanded to become the second-largest of the top three public cloud platforms, just ahead of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and trailing market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The internal project codename "Project Red Dog" was used to identify Azure when it was first unveiled at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October 2008; it was formally released as Windows Azure in February 2010 and changed its name to Microsoft Azure on March 25, 2014.
Azure is billed by Microsoft on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means customers are only billed for the exact resources they have actually used.
Microsoft Azure Services -
Azure leverages large-scale virtualization and provides more than 600 services. In this article I'll be focusing only on few of the important services which have been categorized as below -
- Azure Compute
- Azure Networking
- Azure Storage
- Azure Database
1. Azure Compute
An on-demand computing solution called Azure Compute is used to run cloud-based applications. It offers computing resources including operating systems, networking, and drives, CPUs, and memory. The resources may usually be made available in a matter of minutes or even seconds and are available on demand. You only pay for the resources you actually use, and only for the time that you actually utilize them.
Some of the most prominent services are listed below.
Azure Virtual machine: Allowing users to launch general-purpose Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines, as well as preconfigured machine images for popular software packages
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): Enables you to rapidly install a Kubernetes cluster in Azure that is ready for production. Customers have the freedom to select and scale the data location while Azure manages the control plane (Kubernetes worker nodes)
Azure Container Service: Containers are software packages that run programs with a shared OS kernel without the need of virtual machines and instead rely on virtual isolation. Additionally, a container hosting solution is created by Azure container service.
Azure Functions: It doesn't have a server and enables infrastructure-free code-on-demand.
Azure Batch: It is used to scale N virtual machines simultaneously.
Azure Service Fabric: A tiny service-based application's deployment and lifecycle management are made simpler by this distributed architecture.
API Apps: It is used to build cloud APIs easily.
Azure Container Registry: Container images are kept and managed using it.
2. Azure Networking
The virtual network is the primary building block of Azure network services. We can set up our isolated network on Azure by using a virtual network. Additionally, we can use subnets to partition the virtual network into various sections.
Azure Virtual Network: It carries out network segmentation and isolation while directing traffic through filters. It includes Azure Connect, which enables simple IP-based and Azure Traffic Manager configuration.
Azure Load Balancer balances a virtual machine's traffic load while diverting external traffic to a different virtual machine.
Azure Express Route: Enables you to expand your present network into the Microsoft cloud via a secure connection.
Azure DNS: It translates a website to the IP address.
3. Azure Storage
The Azure storage account is the key component of the Azure storage service. For the majority of Azure storage services, the Storage account functions more or less as an administrative container.
Azure Blob Storage: Azure's blob service is its equivalent to storage in terms of binary large objects (BLOBs). Users are given the option to add metadata to describe their data.
Azure Queue Storage: It enables apps to exchange messages in a queue, preventing lost or incomplete messages.
Azure file: We can utilize Azure files to distribute files between two virtual machines by setting up an Azure file share that both machines can access. Data can be shared between two or more virtual machines.
Azure Table: It can be used to store entities. A few differences exist between the Azure Table and the SQL table. This is a NoSQL datastore where the schema within the table is not enforced.
4. Azure Database
A relational database-as-a-service that provides great performance without requiring any infrastructure, Azure Database is dependable and secure. The basic fundamental building block that is available in Azure is the SQL database.
Azure SQL Database: It is a SQL server-based relational database that is hosted in Azure. It offers a fault-tolerant, highly available, and scalable database.
Azure DocumentDB: It is a NoSQL database-as-a-service with features including rich querying and query processing, a transactional process over no schema data, and transaction semantics that are comparable to relational databases.
Azure Redis Cache: A key-value database with optional persistence is implemented by this data structure.
The benefits of Azure, which make it one of the best cloud service providers, are listed below.
- Your business continuity plan will be cost-effectively improved with Azure infrastructure.
- For all of your data needs, including SQL databases, blobs, and tables, Windows Azure provides the greatest option.
- It provides cost-effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility.
- Sharing documents leads directly to better collaboration
- Helps you scale your IT resources according to your demands.
- With well-known tools and resources, assists you in maintaining consistency across clouds.
With more than 600 services and numerous benefits, Microsoft Azure is undoubtedly the fastest-growing cloud computing platform being adopted by businesses.
With this, I'll conclude this post here.
In next posts, we'll delve deeper and learn more about Azure.
Thank you for reading!
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