AZURE

Microsoft Azure often referred to as?Azure?is a?cloud computing service operated by?Microsoft?for application management via Microsoft-managed?data centers. It provides?Software as a Service (SaaS),?Platform as a Service (PaaS),?and?Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?and supports many different?programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

Azure uses large-scale?virtualization?at Microsoft data centers worldwide and it offers more than 600 services.

Azure Automation provides a way for users to automate the manual, long-running, error-prone, and frequently repeated tasks that are commonly performed in a cloud and enterprise environment. It saves time and increases the reliability of regular administrative tasks and even schedules them to be automatically performed at regular intervals. You can automate processes using run-books or automate configuration management using Desired State Configuration.

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) provides tools and ML frameworks for developers to create their own machine learning and?artificial intelligence?(AI) services.

Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services are a set of prebuilt APIs, SDKs, and customizable services for developers, including perceptual and cognitive intelligence covering speech recognition, speaker recognition, neural speech synthesis, face recognition, computer vision, OCR/form understanding, natural language processing, machine translation, and business decision services. Most AI features appeared in Microsoft’s own products and services (Bing, Office, Teams, Xbox, and Windows) are powered by Azure Cognitive Services.

Through Azure?Blockchain Workbench, Microsoft is providing the required infrastructure to set up a consortium network in multiple topologies using a variety of consensus mechanisms. Microsoft provides integration from these blockchain platforms to other Microsoft services to streamline the development of distributed applications. Microsoft supports many general-purpose blockchains including Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric and purpose-built blockchains like Corda.

Azure functions are used in?serverless computing?architectures where subscribers can execute code as an event-driven Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) without managing the underlying server resources.

Azure IoT Hub?lets you connect, monitor, and manage billions of IoT assets. On February 4, 2016, Microsoft announced the General Availability of the Azure IoT Hub service.

Azure IoT Edge?is a fully managed service built on IoT Hub that allows for cloud intelligence deployed locally on IoT edge devices.

Azure IoT Central?is a fully managed?SaaS?app that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets at scale. On December 5, 2017, Microsoft announced the Public Preview of Azure IoT Central; its Azure IoT?SaaS?service.