Microsoft Azure Tutorial

Let’s know the terms Azure and cloud computing. Azure: Azure means “a bright blue color” as we see the cloudless sky. Here, Microsoft Azure together defined as an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help an organization meet its business challenges. It provides a range of cloud services to develop, manage, and deploy applications on a global network using your favorite tools and frameworks freely. In October 2008, Azure was announced and began with the codename “Project Red Dog”; further, it had released on February 1, 2010, as “Windows Azure.” Lastly, it was renamed as “Microsoft Azure” on March 25, 2014.

Why is the right choice?

These are the perfect reasons for adapting Azure as the right choice: Productive: Azure delivers features faster with more than 100 end-to-end services to reduce marketing cycles. Using Azure, you can build applications with the language of your choice, including Node.js, java, and .Net to run faster by which you get your ideas into solutions quickly. Hybrid: Azure is the only consistent and comprehensive hybrid cloud that facilitates you the broadest set of hybrid capabilities. It delivers exact hybrid consistency in your applications, data, identity, security, and management across on-premises and cloud environments. Intelligent: Using Azure, you can develop breakthrough apps with built-in intelligence. It provides you a comprehensive set of services, infrastructure, and tools to build AI-powered experiences. To enable new skills in your apps for human-like intelligence you can use a fulfilled set of Azure data and AI services that includes Azure Databricks, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure Bot service. Trusted: Azure is more trusted and has more certifications than any other cloud provider. Azure has clear security and privacy concerns, meets an extensive set of standards as follows:

• International and industry-specific compliance standards like General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, HIPAA. ISO 27001, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and SOC 2
• Country/region-specific standards such as UK G-Cloud, Australia IRAP, and Singapore MTCS.

Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is the most innovative technology on Today’s trend that delivers computing services- servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, intelligence, and moreover the internet in the cloud form to provide faster innovation, flexible resources, and scalable economies.  It has many top advantages as follows: Cost: You can buy hardware and software free of capital expense. Speed: Most of the Cloud computing services on just a few mouse clicks, give businesses a lot of flexibility and take the pressure off capacity planning of being provided as self-service and on demand. Global Scale: Cloud computing services can scale elastically. Productivity: Cloud computing removes the requirement of hardware set up, software patching, and other IT management chores for on-site datacenters by which IT teams can spend time on achieving more critical business goals. Performance: Cloud computing services offer many benefits over a single corporate data center, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale by running on a global network of secure data centers that are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. Security: Cloud providers strengthen the security posture overall by offering a broad set of policies, technologies and controls that protect your data, apps, and infrastructure from potential threats. Azure products and services These are the following Azure cloud services and products categorized by Microsoft as follows: Compute - Compute services enable a user to deploy and manage virtual machines VMs, containers and batch processing, supporting remote application access. Web - Web services support the development and deployment of web applications, offering features for search, content delivery, application programming interface API management, notification, and reporting. Data storage - These services provide scalable cloud storage for structured and unstructured data, supporting big data projects, persistent storage for containers and archival storage. Analytics - Analytics provide distributed analytics and storage, real-time analytics, big data analytics, data lakes, machine learning, business intelligence BI, internet of things (IoT) data streams and data warehousing. Networking - Networking such as virtual networking, dedicated connections, and gateways, also provide services for traffic management and diagnostics, load balancing, domain name system DNS hosting, and network protection against distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks. Media and content delivery network CDN -Azure Media and Content Delivery Network CDN services include on-demand streaming, digital rights protection, encoding and media playback, and indexing. Hybrid integration -These services include server backup, site recovery and connecting private and public clouds. Identity and access management IAM - IAM offerings ensure authorized users to access Azure services by protecting encryption keys and any other relevant information in the cloud. Internet of things - These services include notifications, analytics, monitoring and support for coding and execution by which users can capture, monitor and analyze IoT data from sensors and other devices. Artificial intelligence AI and machine learning - These services help developers to infuse machine learning, AI and cognitive computing capabilities into applications and data sets. Containers - An enterprise can create, register, orchestrate and manage vast volumes of containers as another Azure service in the Azure cloud, using common platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes. Databases - These services include SQL Data Warehouse support, caching, hybrid database integration and migration features. Azure provides Database as a Service DBaaS offerings for SQL and NoSQL plus the database instances such as Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. DevOps -These services intensify DevOps software development processes with the help of project and collaboration tools, such as Visual Studio Team Service, and also offer features for application diagnostics, DevOps tools integrations. Mobile - A developer can develop cloud applications for mobile devices with features such as notification services, supporting back-end tasks, and tools for building APIs. Management – A cloud administrator can manage Azure deployment by a range of services including backup, recovery, compliance, automation, scheduling, and monitoring tools.

PROS and CONS of Microsoft Azure

PROS High Availability Microsoft Azure cloud offers a Service Level Agreement or SLA, of 99.95% (approximately 4.38 hours of downtime per year) to the businesses with high availability and redundancy in data centers on a global scale. Security Microsoft Azure is paired with strong cyber controls and is the standard security model of detect, assess, diagnose, stabilize and Close. It provides simple, user-friendly services for the protection of multi-factor authentication and application password requirements. Scalability Microsoft Azure with its scalability structure provides flexibility to businesses; makes it easy to scale the compute power up or down with nothing more than the click of a button. Cost-Effectiveness Microsoft Azure cloud environment allows businesses to launch both customer applications and internal apps in the cloud; thus reduce the hardware and maintenance burdens on in-house IT management saves infrastructure costs. CONS                                                                                                       Requires Management Microsoft Azure needs to be expertly managed and maintained for its effectiveness. It doesn’t handle your cloud-based data-center, you must have boots on the ground that will tell you how to use Azure server monitoring and patching otherwise you must learn Azure management by yourself or another different solution. Requires Platform Expertise Microsoft Azure requires expertise to ensure all moving parts work together efficiently. Lack of Integrated Backup Microsoft Azure is not useful for doing bare-metal restores of servers in a remote data center.