Azure Documentation

Welcome to the official documentation hub for Microsoft Azure. Explore a vast array of services, guides, tutorials, and best practices to help you build, deploy, and manage your applications on the cloud.

Introduction to Azure

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that offers a wide range of services, including computing, analytics, storage, and networking. It allows developers and IT professionals to build, deploy, and manage applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers.

Key benefits of using Azure include:

• Scalability: Easily scale your resources up or down based on demand.
• Flexibility: Choose from a wide variety of services and deployment models.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Pay only for what you use with a pay-as-you-go model.
• Global Reach: Deploy applications close to your users with a worldwide network of data centers.

For a deeper dive, visit the Azure Products page.

Compute Services

Azure Compute provides powerful virtualized computing resources to run your applications and workloads.

Virtual Machines (VMs)

Azure Virtual Machines offer on-demand, scalable computing resources. You can use VMs to deploy and run applications on hardware that you manage yourself. Common use cases include:

• Running enterprise applications
• Developing and testing applications
• Hosting websites and web applications

Example of creating a VM using Azure CLI:

az vm create \
  --resource-group myResourceGroup \
  --name myVM \
  --image Ubuntu2204 \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --generate-ssh-keys

Containers

Azure offers robust services for containerized applications, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Container Instances (ACI).

• AKS: A managed Kubernetes service for orchestrating containers.
• ACI: Run containers without managing virtual machines.

App Services

Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps and mobile back ends. It supports a variety of languages and frameworks.

Storage Services

Azure Storage offers highly available, massively scalable, and durable storage solutions for your data.

Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage is an object storage solution for the cloud. It's optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data.

File Storage

Azure Files provides fully managed cloud file shares that are accessible via the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.

Disk Storage

Azure Disk Storage offers high-performance, durable disk options for Azure VMs. Choose between SSDs and HDDs based on your performance needs.

Networking Services

Azure Networking provides the building blocks for your cloud network infrastructure.

Virtual Networks (VNets)

Azure Virtual Network is the fundamental building block for your private cloud on Azure. It enables many types of Azure resources, such as Azure Virtual Machines, to securely communicate with each other, with the internet, and on-premises networks.

Load Balancer

Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 load balancer that distributes network traffic among multiple virtual machines or services.

VPN Gateway

Azure VPN Gateway connects your on-premises networks to your Azure virtual networks securely over the public internet.

Database Services

Azure provides a comprehensive suite of managed database services to support various application needs.

Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database service built on the latest stable version of Microsoft SQL Server.

Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service that enables you to create applications with scale and throughput that you can’t find anywhere else.

Security & Identity

Azure offers a robust set of security and identity services to protect your cloud resources. Key services include Azure Active Directory (now Microsoft Entra ID), Azure Security Center, and Azure Key Vault.

Monitoring & Management

Monitor the performance and health of your Azure resources with services like Azure Monitor and Azure Advisor. These tools provide insights, diagnostics, and recommendations.

Tip: Always refer to the official Azure documentation for the most up-to-date information and detailed guides.