What is Azure?

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)

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

Virtual machines, storage, and networking will come under the category of infrastructure as a service but the users have to do manually the build and deploy of the applications. Azure will support a wide range of operating systems because of its Hyper-hypervisor.

To know more about IaaS you can refer to this link What is IaaS?

Platform as a service (PaaS)

Azure app service, Azure functions, and logic apps are some services that are offered by Azure under the platform as a service. This service will provide autoscaling and load balancing and also there will be a pre-configured environment for the application.

To know more about PaaS you can refer to this link What is PaaS?

Software as a service (SaaS)

Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure Active Directory are some of the services provided by Microsoft Azure under Software as a Service (SaaS) the complete application will be managed by the Microsoft azure including deploying, scaling and load balancing.

What is a Public Cloud? Everything You Need to Know

Computing in which service provider makes all resources public over the internet. It is connected to the public Internet. Service provider serves resources such as virtual machines, applications, storage, etc to the general public over the internet. It may be free of cost or with minimal pay-per-usage. It is available for public display, Google uses the cloud to run some of its applications like google docs, google drive or YouTube, etc.  It is the most common way of implementing cloud computing. The external cloud service provider owns, operates, and delivers it over the public network. It is best for the companies which need an infrastructure to accommodate a large number of customers and work on projects which have diverse organizations i.e. research institutions and NGOs etc. 

Key Characteristics of Public Clouds

The following are the characteristics of Public Cloud:

• Accessibility: Public clouds are easily accessible over the internet from anywhere, enabling convenient access to resources.
• Scalability: They offer scalability, allowing users to quickly adjust resources based on demand, ensuring efficient resource utilization.
• Cost-effectiveness: Public clouds operate on a pay-as-you-go model, reducing upfront costs and enabling cost-effective usage of resources.
• Security: Robust security measures such as encryption, access controls, and compliance certifications are implemented to protect data and infrastructure.

What is Microsoft Azure Used For?

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.

Azure for Disaster Recovery and Backup

A full range of disaster recovery (DR) and backup services are available from Microsoft Azure to help shield your vital data and apps from interruptions. With the help of these services, you may quickly restore your data and applications in the event of a disaster by replicating them to a secondary cloud site. Azure backup services also protect your data from ransomware attacks, unintentional deletion, and corruption.