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What is Microsoft Azure - The World Map of Things

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azure-map

In today’s journey to the middle earth, let’s talk about Microsoft Azure. In your journey to explore the world of Azure, you’ll need a map. The map will be your key to understanding different components of Azure and how they can fit together.

The great sea of Datacenter Infrastructure

The great sea connects 30+ datacenters around the world. These are located in different regions, connected. These datacenters at time several football fields houses all the servers, equipments, containers to power the ever growing digital world. The great sea connects the underlying layer of cloud computing, Infrastructure as a Service.

The land of Security & Management

Azure AD can be used as a standalone cloud directory for your organization or as an integrated solution with your existing on-premises Active Directory.

  • Active Directory- Secure, enterprise ready identity and access management for the cloud. Synchronise on-premise directories and enable single sign-on.
  • Multi-Factor Authentication- safeguards data/application access while addressing demand for a simple sign-in process

Media & CDN

This section is where your scale, CDN goodness comes in. Reduce latency? No problem. This is you have come to the right place.

  • Media Services- Create end-to-end media workflows with flexible and highly scalable encoding, packaging, and distribution services
  • CDN - delivering content to end-users through a robust network of global data centres

Integration

The integration area is a place you can find stuff like logic apps. Business workflow? Logic app can help you to take care of it by connecting to different services. You then can automate workflows. #justinbieber, save all the picture on insta to my DB. Checked.

Compute Services

This section is to assist you scale your VM. Clone them, scale up.

Application Platforms

This section is where the goodness is. From creating a website to connecting your mobile app to cloud backend. It’s all here. You can do push notifications, host APIs, or even host functions.

  • Web Sites – develop, deployment & scale web apps
  • Mobile Services - scalable & secure backend for your mobile apps
  • Notification Hubs - easily route cross-platform, personalized push notification messages to millions of users simultaneously, and scale automatically without needing to rearchitect your app
  • API Management - Publish APIs to developers, partners and employees securely and at scale

Developer Services

This place is where you use think about app distribution, analytics, app insights. Got a beta program? Why not use hockeyapp to distribute. We are friendly to iOS, Android, Windows & Web too. Mobile Engagement helps you to understand your app users more.

Data land

In this realm, you’ll be exposed to different database flavors. From SQL Azure to Mongo to DocumentDB, its all here.

  • Storage– Blobs, Tables, Queues & Files Storage - store large amounts of unstructured text/binary data such as video/image &audio.
  • SQL Database- For applications that need a full featured relational database-as-a-service
  • DocumentDB – fully managed NoSQL document database that offers query and transactions over schema free data
  • Cache- High throughput, low latency data access for your application to build fast, scalable cloud applications
  • Azure Redis Cache -Based on the popular open source Redis Cache, this gives you access to a secure, dedicated Redis cache for your Azure applications.
  • Azure Search – “Search as a Service” for web and mobile applications without the typical complexities of full-text search

Intelligence

This is the land of AI. Artificial Intelligence they call. This section live cognitive services. 22 APIs available to developers to leverage on. Recognizing face, emotion, converting speech to text, making sense of objects are just some of the easier stuff cognitive services allows you to do. Bots, bots everywhere. Make use of Bot Framework to build for Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, Telegram and many more.

Analytics and IoT

This area you can find all the tools to help you munch big data like biting a banana. Hadoop, machine learning, predictions are some of its muscles. You can connect your Internet of Things(IoT) device here to make use of the predictive, machine learning capabilities. You can even build a chart using PowerBI embedded.

  • HDInsight - Microsoft’s Hadoop-based service for gaining insight from any data, size or location
  • Machine Learning – Powerful cloud-based predictive analytics
  • Stream Analytics – Real-time stream processing in the cloud
  • Data Factory – orchestrate and manage data transformation and movement
  • Event Hubs – Ingest, persist, and process millions of events/telemetry per second from websites, apps and devices

Hybrid Cloud

This section lives the hybrid dragon. Disaster recovery, archiving and backup. You can use this.

  • Storage – Blobs, Tables, Queues & Files Storage - store large amounts of unstructured text/binary data such as video/image & audio.
  • Backup - Automated server backups – stored securely in the cloud
  • Site Recovery–Orchestrate the protection and recovery of your applications for simplified disaster recovery
  • StorSimple - A unique hybrid cloud storage solution that lowers costs and improves data protection