What is Microsoft Azure

December 25, 2021

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What is Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure, is Microsoft's public cloud computing platform. It provides a range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage and networking. Users can pick and choose from these services to develop and scale new applications, or run existing applications in the public cloud.

Azure was initially launched on February 1, 2010, It's one of the popular cloud computing platforms operationg on a large scale like

  • Google Cloud
  • Amazone Web Service
  • IBM

Things to know about Azure

  • It was launched on February 1, 2010, significantly later than its main competitor, AWS.
  • It’s free to start and follows a pay-per-use model, which means you pay only for the services you opt for.
  • Interestingly, 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies use Azure services for their cloud computing needs.
  • Azure supports multiple programming languages, including Java, Node Js, and C#.
  • Another benefit of Azure is the number of data centers it has around the world. There are 42 Azure data centers spread around the globe, which is the highest number of data centers for any cloud platform. Also, Azure is planning to get 12 more data centers, which will increase the number of data centers to 54, shortly.

What is Azure used for

Because Microsoft Azure consists of numerous service offerings, its use cases are extremely diverse. Running virtual machines or containers in the cloud is one of the most popular uses for Microsoft Azure. These compute resources can host infrastructure components, such as

  • domain name system (DNS) servers
  • Windows Server services -- such as Internet Information Services (IIS) or
  • third-party applications. Microsoft also supports the use of third-party operating systems, such as Linux.

Azure is also commonly used as a platform for hosting databases in the cloud. Microsoft offers serverless relational databases such as Azure SQL and non-relational databases such as NoSQL.

In addition, the platform is frequently used for backup and disaster recovery. Many organizations use Azure storage as archive in order to meet their long-term Data retention requirements.

That it the cool feature that leads to migrating to Azure, let's take an example

To day my company has an on-premises server where we host our data, It really requires much of security in the place... troubleshooting the servers when they are down, Maintainance work and fees, I need a backup and etc.

In that case I will need to migrate from on-premises to Azure all that work will no longer be needed, My servers will always be able, I don't care of maintainance, no maintaince fees required and my data is very safe. I don't have to care about the backup and etc

How doest It work

Azure provides more than 200 services, are divided into 18 categories. These categories include

  • computing,
  • networking,
  • storage,
  • IoT,
  • migration,
  • mobile,
  • analytics,
  • containers,
  • artificial intelligence, and other machine learning,
  • integration,
  • management tools,
  • developer tools,
  • security,
  • databases,
  • DevOps,
  • media identity, and
  • web services.

Then Why should you use Azure

Now that you know more about Azure and the services it provides, you might be interested in exploring the various uses of Azure.

  • Application development: You can create any web application in Azure.
  • Testing: After developing an application successfully on the platform, you can test it.
  • Application hosting: Once the testing is done, Azure can help you host the application.
  • Create virtual machines: You can create virtual machines in any configuration you want with the help of Azure.
  • Integrate and sync features: Azure lets you integrate and sync virtual devices and directories.
  • Collect and store metrics: Azure lets you collect and store metrics, which can help you find what works.
  • Virtual hard drives: These are extensions of the virtual machines; they provide a huge amount of data storage.

Concluding

As a conclusing Azure is the fast growing cloud computing platform with more than 200 services and trusted with big companies such as

2Enable, 2GIS, 365mc, 3M, 3M Informatics, A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, ABB Group, ABBYY, AbelDent, Aberdeenshire Council, ABIOMED INC, ABN AMRO BANK, Absolut, Abu Dhabi Digital Authority (ADDA), Abu Dhabi Global Market Courts, Accenture, Accenture - Ireland, Accenture - United States, AccuWeather, Inc., ACHMEA - Zilveren Kruis, Acquire Digital, Actionable Science, ActionPoint Technology Group, Acumatica

You can get more companies from here

For Developer Azure is a new carrier looking for developers who can migrate services to Azure, who can maitain an Azure based services and who have the skills to intergrate Azure resources with other services. As a bonus, today you can build a blockchain application over Azure

References

https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/azure-tutorial/what-is-azure

https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/

https://enlyft.com/tech/products/microsoft-azure

https://www.contino.io/insights/whos-using-microsoft-azure-2020

#azure