Introduction to Azure

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure that allows you to build, deploy, and manage applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers.

Azure provides a wide range of services, including computing, analytics, storage, and networking. It enables developers and IT professionals to build and run applications with the flexibility, scalability, and security they need.

Key benefits of using Azure include:

• Scalability: Easily scale your resources up or down based on demand.
• Global Reach: Deploy applications to data centers around the world.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Pay only for what you use with a pay-as-you-go model.
• Security: Benefit from Microsoft's extensive security investments and compliance offerings.

Compute Services

Azure offers a variety of compute services to run your applications and workloads.

Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) provide on-demand, scalable computing resources. You can use VMs to deploy and run applications like Windows Server or Linux.

Key features:

• Choice of operating systems.
• Flexible configurations for CPU, memory, and storage.
• Integration with Azure's networking and storage services.

To create a VM, you can use the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell. For example, using the Azure CLI:

Containers

Azure supports various containerization technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes.

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): A managed Kubernetes service that simplifies deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications.
• Azure Container Instances (ACI): Run containers in Azure without managing virtual machines or higher-level orchestrators.

Azure App Service

App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps and APIs that connect to on-premises or cloud data.

Supports:

• .NET, .NET Core, Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and Python.
• Web apps, mobile backends, and RESTful APIs.
• CI/CD integration with Azure DevOps, GitHub, and other services.

Storage Services

Azure Storage provides a highly available, scalable, and secure cloud storage solution.

Azure Blob Storage

Object storage for a wide variety of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. Used for serving images or documents directly to a browser, storing files for distributed access, streaming video and audio, storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and data warehousing.

Azure Files

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

Azure Queue Storage

A service that stores large numbers of messages that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS.

Databases

Azure offers a comprehensive suite of managed database services for relational and NoSQL data.

Azure SQL Database

A fully managed relational database service that supports many of the latest SQL Server features. It's a Platform as a Service (PaaS) database engine.

Azure Cosmos DB

A globally distributed, multi-model database service. It allows you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of geographic regions. Cosmos DB provides robust service level agreements (SLAs) for availability, latency, throughput, and consistency.

Networking

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

Services include:

• Virtual Networks
• Load Balancer
• Application Gateway
• VPN Gateway

Security

Azure Security Center provides unified security management and advanced threat protection across your hybrid cloud workloads.

Key aspects include:

• Identity and Access Management (Azure AD)
• Network Security
• Data Protection
• Threat Detection