Microsoft Azure

Designed by Microsoft in 2010, Microsoft Azure is one of the widely used cloud computing platforms. Azure provides a wide variety of services such as cloud storage, compute services, network services, cognitive services, databases, analytics, and IoT. It makes building, deploying, and managing applications very easy. All the Microsoft Azure fundamentals are also described for a better understanding of readers.

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform, just like Google has its Google Cloud and Amazon has its Amazon Web Service or AWS.000. Generally, it is a platform through which we can use Microsoft’s resources. For example, to set up a huge server, we will require huge investment, effort, physical space, and so on. In such situations, Microsoft Azure comes to our rescue. It will provide us with virtual machines, fast processing of data, analytical and monitoring tools, and so on to make our work simpler. The pricing of Azure is also simpler and more cost-effective. Popularly termed as “Pay As You Go”, which means how much you use, pay only for that.

How does Microsoft Azure Work?

It is a private and public cloud platform that helps developers and IT professionals build deploy and manage applications. It uses the technology known as virtualization. Virtualization separates the tight coupling between the hardware and the operating system using an abstraction layer called a hypervisor. Hypervisor emulates all the functions of a computer in a virtual machine, it can run multiple virtual machines at the same time and each virtual machine can run any operating system, such as Windows or Linux.

Azure takes this virtualization technique and repeats it on a massive scale in the data center owned by Microsoft. Each data center has many racks filled with servers and each server includes a hypervisor to run multiple virtual machines. The network switch provides connectivity to all those servers.

Types of Azure Services

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform which offers the following types of services:

• Infrastructure as a service ( IaaS )
• Platform as a service (PaaS)
• Software as a service (SaaS)

Microsoft Azure Uses

Following are the some the use cases that Microsoft Azure Used.

• Deployment Of applications: You can develop and deploy the application in the azure cloud by using the service called Azure App Service and Azure Functions after deploying the applications end users can access it.
• Identity and Access Management: The application and data which is deployed and stored in the Microsoft Azure can be secured with the help of Identity and Access Management. It’s commonly used for single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and identity governance.
• Data Storage and Databases: You can store the data in Microsoft azure in service like blob storage for unstructured data, table storage for NoSQL data, file storage, and Azure SQL Database for relational databases. The service can be scaled depending on the amount of data we are getting.
• DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Azure DevOps will provide some tools like including version control, build automation, release management, and application monitoring.