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.

1.1 What is Cloud Computing

1.2 Azure in the Real World

1.2.1 Hosting a Web Application

1.2.2 Running a Hybrid Network

1.2.3 Mitigating Risks and Outages

1.2.4 Automating infrastructure with ARM templates

1.3 Why move to cloud?

1.3.1 Scalability

1.3.2 Reliability

1.3.3 Expanding Infrastructure

1.3.4 Support

1.3.5 Compliance

1.4 Costs

1.4.1 Free account

1.4.2 PAYG

1.4.3 Reserved instances

1.4.4 Spot pricing

1.4.5 Billing

1.5 What are the alternatives?

1.5.1 On premises

1.5.2 Other cloud providers

1.5.3 Multi-cloud approach

1.6 Interacting with Azure

1.6.1 Azure Portal

1.6.2 Azure CLI

1.6.3 Azure PowerShell

1.6.4 SDKs

1.7 Creating an Azure account

1.8 Summary