The Basics of Azure (Pt 1)

What is Cloud Computing?

Have you ever wondered what cloud computing is? Cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer. Cloud computing offers faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Azure is a cloud computing platform, launched by Microsoft in February 2010.

Azure is a continually expanding set of cloud services that helps organizations meet their current and future business challenges. Azure gives the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.

Types of Azure Cloud Computing

IAAS (Infrastructure as a service)

PAAS (Platform as a service)

SAAS (Software as a service)

Azure IAAS

The first cloud computing type is infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which is used for Internet-based access to storage and computing power. The most basic category of cloud computing types, IaaS lets you rent IT infrastructure - servers and virtual machines, storage, networks, and operating systems - from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Azure PAAS

The second cloud computing type is platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that gives developers the tools to build and host web applications. PaaS is designed to give users access to the components they require to quickly develop and operate web or mobile applications over the Internet, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, networks, and databases.

Azure SAAS

The third cloud computing type is software-as-a-service (SaaS) which is used for web-based applications. SaaS is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet where cloud providers host and manage the software applications making it easier to have the same application on all your devices at once by accessing it in the cloud.

Azure Key Concepts

Now in this Azure basics for beginner tutorial, we will learn Azure key concepts as listed below.

Concept Name	Description
Regions	Azure is a global cloud platform that is available across various regions around the world. When you request a service, application, or VM in Azure, you are first asked to specify a region. The selected region represents the datacenter where your application runs.
Datacenter	In Azure, you can deploy your applications into a variety of data centers around the globe. So, it is advisable to select a region which is closer to most of your customers. It helps you to reduce latency in network requests.
Azure Portal	The Azure portal is a web-based application that can be used to create, manage and remove Azure resources and services. It is located at https://portal.azure.com.
Resource	Resource in Azure is a virtual machine, role, or instance type that can be used for compute, storage, or networking.
Resource group	A 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 those resources that you want to manage as a group.
Resource Manager templates	It is a JSON that defines one or more resources to deploy to a resource group. It also establishes dependencies between deployed resources.
Automation	Azure allows you to automate the process of creating, managing and deleting resource by using PowerShell or the Azure command-line Interface(CLI).
Azure PowerShell	PowerShell is a set of modules that offer cmdlets to manage Azure. In most cases, you are allowed to use, the cmdlets command for the same tasks which you are performing in the Azure portal.
Azure command-line interface(CLI)	The Azure CLI is a tool that you can use to create, manage, and remove Azure resources from the command line.
REST APIs	Azure is built on a set of REST APIs help you perform the same operation that you do in Azure portal Ul. It allows your Azure resources and apps to be manipulated via any third party software application.