Azure is the cloud computing platform from Microsoft. It provides Software As a Service(SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) and Platform As A Service(PaaS) cloud services. Initial release of MS Azure was in 2010 and currently it is among the top 3 cloud service in the world. Azure is a subscription based cloud service in which you pay for what you use or plan to use and add or release resource based on your need.
Azure Services:
Azure provides over 600 services out of which major categories are the following:
Compute Services: This includes Azure Virtual Machines — both Linux and Windows, cloud services and Batch services for large scale parallel and batch compute jobs.
Data Services: This includes Data Storage services. Azure can store data in various formats like Blob, tables, SQL DB etc
Application Services: This includes services that can be used to build and deploy your applications such as Azure Active Directory, HDInsight for processing big data, Azure DataBricks service etc
Network Service: This service helps enterprises to connect cloud and on-premises infrastructure to provide the best user experience to customers.
Azure Key Concepts:
Datacenters and regions: Azure has datacenters spread across the globe. Selecting a datacenter close to your business will help in reducing the network latency.
Azure Portal: It is the web interface for creating, managing and removing resources and servies. The url of the portal is https://portal.azure.com. The portal has a customizable dashboard and tools for managing Azure resources. it also provides billing and subscription information.
Resources: Resources are services for compute, networking, data storage or app hosting services. Resources can be a Virtual Machine, Storage account or SQL databases.
Resource Groups: Resource group is a container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. The resource group can include all the resources for the solution, or only resources that you want to manage as a group.
Resource Manager templates: An Azure Resource Manager is a JSON template that defines one or more resources to deploy to a resource group. It also defines the dependencies between deployed resources.
Automation: In addition to creating, managing and deleting resources by using Azure portal, these activities can be automated by using PowerShell, Azure command-line interface or REST APIs.
Azure Resource Manager:
Azure Resource Manager is a deployment, management and organization mechanism for Azure resources. By using Resource manager, we can put many individual resources together in a resource group.
Azure Virtual Machines:
Azure Virtual Machine supports the deployment of Windows or Linux Virtual Machines in an Azure Datacenter. VM provides total control over the VM configuration, installation and maintenance. User have the option to select an image from the Azure Marketplace or create their own customized image while creating a Virtual Machine.
Azure Storage:
Azure storage provides durable and scalable storage with appropriate back up mechanism. Azure includes four types of storage:
Blob Storage: Blob is an acronym of Binary Large OBject. Blobs are unstructured files. Blob storage can store any type of text or binary data, such as document, media file, installer etc. Three kinds of blobs in Azure are Block blobs, for files that are read from beginning to end such as image files, media files etc. These are named as block blobs because files larger than 64 MB are uploaded as small blocks. These blocks are then consolidated into the final blob. Page Blobs are used to hold random access files up to 1 TB in size. They are called Page Blobs because they provide random read/write access to 512 byte pages. Append blobs consist of blocks like block blobs, but optimized for append operations. A single append blob can be up to 195 GB.
File Storage: Azure File Storage is a service that offers file shares in the cloud by using Standard Server Message Block(SMB) protocol. Applications running on Azure VMs or in cloud services or from on-premises clients can mount a file share in the cloud. Any number of application components can them mount and access the file storage share simultaneously.
Table Storage: Azure Table Storage is a service that stores structured NoSQL data in the cloud. Table storage is a key/attribute store with a schema less design. Because it is schema less, it is easy to adapt your data needs as your applications evolve. Access to data is fast and cost effective.
Queue Storage: Azure Queue storage provides cloud messaging between application components. In designing applications for scale, application components are often decoupled so that can scale independently. Queue storage delivers asynchronous messaging for communication between application components, whether they are running in the cloud, on the desktop, on an on-premises or on a mobile device. Queue storage also supports managing asynchronous tasks and building process workflows.
Azure Virtual Network:
Azure Virtual Networks are necessary to support communications between virtual machines. You can define subnets, custom IP address, DNS settings, security filtering and load balancing using Azure Virtual Networks. By using a VPN gateway, you can connect Azure Virtual Networks to your on-premises network.
Reference: www.microsoft.com
