1 What is Microsoft Azure?
This chapter covers
- Overview of Microsoft Azure
- The benefits of using cloud computing and Azure
- What you can and can’t do with Azure
- Interacting with Azure services
- Creating a free Azure account
Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform — a collection of hundreds of services for computing, networking, storage, and more — all available over the internet. Whether you’re a solo developer on a tight budget or part of a large enterprise, you can use Azure to build and run applications without buying or maintaining physical servers.
You might use Azure to host a website, store and protect terabytes of files, run machine learning models, back up your company data, or connect global networks. From small experiments to mission-critical workloads, Azure is designed to scale with you.