Microsoft Azure 101
The focus of this chapter is on Microsoft Azure IaaS and storage, but Microsoft Azure
does have other capabilities. This section covers the major ones briefly so that you
have at least some basic knowledge of the breadth of Microsoft Azure functionality.
Figure 12.3 shows the four main building blocks of the Microsoft Azure platform. I
have concentrated on the Infrastructure services that have compute, storage, and
networking, which are the focus of this chapter. Security and Management include
services such as the Azure portal, Azure Active Directory, multifactor authentication,
automation, and the Marketplace. Hybrid Operations include services such as backup,
Site Recovery, and privileged identity management. Platform Services is a small box in
the picture, but in reality it is a huge part of what Azure delivers, including the Service
Fabric, Cloud Services, Web Apps, SQL Database, Tables, HDinsight, Data Factory,
Machine Learning, Media Services, Content Delivery Network, and the list goes on.
Azure has about 200 offerings at the time of this writing, and the list is constantly
growing.
Figure 12.3 The four main building blocks of the Microsoft Azure platform
In the next sections, I cover compute, storage, networking, load balancing, and all of
the goodness needed to run applications for all of these components. There are Azure
regions throughout the world, with each region having multiple datacenters. Regions
exist in the United States, Europe, Asia, Japan, China, Australia, India, Canada, and
Brazil, with more being added each year. The full list can be found at
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/. When an application is deployed to
Microsoft Azure, the customer can select where the application should be deployed.
All regions in Microsoft Azure are paired to protect the data replicated between them
in the event of a site failure.
In the following sections, I cover the main services available in Microsoft Azure, but
keep in mind that Azure is constantly changing. For the most up-to-date list of
available services and more details, I recommend viewing
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/services/.
Microsoft Azure Compute