Microsoft Azure

Azure is Microsoft Infrastructure and Platform, one of the leaders in the Cloud
Computing concept.  It started couple of years ago as
a platform as a service targeting developers to build and host on top of it new
cloud solutions.  For sure it gave them
the ability to build these Cloud Solutions with different programming language,
developers developing their applications on Azure are aiming for high
availability and high scalability for their applications, paying only for their
consumption of mainly processing power and storage. 

The second big move for Azure was getting more in the market
with the infrastructure as a services targeting the IT pros too to join and be
able to host their different platforms and applications on Azure Virtual
Machines.  Plus Microsoft Azure is
offering the best hybrid Cloud solutions for the enterprises with different
scenarios empowering the customer to take more control on his data and
applications and the same time to cut cost for its IT infrastructure.

Microsoft Azure has mainly 4 main service categories,
starting with the data, compute, Networks and App Services that you can add and
bind to your applications.  If you go to
Microsoft Azure documentation,
you will find that all Microsoft Azure services and mainly categorized under
these 4 service categories.  The compute
services are all the services where the IT pros or the developer can use the
processing power of Azure to run on top of its solution like the virtual
machines for the infrastructure and the cloud services for the Platform.  The compute services guarantee its consumer
to host the solution with high availability.

The data services mainly its users are the developers, they
need to know and understand the different type of data services from technical
and also from a pricing perspective. 
This where you can scale your data as much as you need.  Microsoft Azure provides three data types,
the structured data which is known as the Microsoft Azure Database, unstructured
data which is like an array of zeros and ones known on Azure as BLOB (Binary
Large Object) mainly used for the different type of files and at the end the
semi structured which is a bit like non relation tables with the ability of
scaling up to terabytes.  For sure will
cover each one of them in a blog post later for more clarification and with all
related services.

The Network services most of the time used by the IT pros
where they can build virtual network on top of Microsoft Azure linking multiple
Virtual machines together under one or more subnet, or even more building
Virtual private network between Azure and their IT infrastructure.

The last group of services are the app service, which are a
group of services that you can choose one of them or multiple of them to help
you build better solutions on Azure whether you were an IT pros or a developer.

These are in brief Microsoft Azure services, now talking
about Microsoft Azure data centers. 
Azure nowadays exists around the globe in different datacenters.  Azure has so far 17 datacenters worldwide,
you might not have access to all of them, some of them might be not yet
available for public usage. The developer or IT pros has the power to choose
where to host his solution depending on his target customers locations for the
best performance.  Also Microsoft Azure
has more CDNs
(Content Delivery Network) around the globe which helps sending the required
data or applications to the customer in a faster way.

In this blog, I will show you how to start working with Microsoft Azure different Services.