I seem to be spending more and more of my time on Microsoft Azure, so thought it would be a good idea to start a blog series on Azure Concepts to provide an overview of the following:
- Identity and Access
- Availability Sets and Patching
- Storage
- Virtual Machines
- Network Connectivity
- Hybrid Cloud
- Disaster Recovery
What is Microsoft Azure?
So the first question is what is Microsoft Azure? The best explanation that I could find is from Wikipedia
“Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed and Microsoft partner hosted datacenters. It provides both PaaS and IaaS services and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems”
For me, the part which is missing from the above statement is “providing resources on demand on a pay as you go basis”.
Scale
To give you an idea of the current scale of Microsoft Azure, I thought it would be fun to share a few facts:
- Microsoft Azure operates in 21 different regions
- Microsoft Azure recieves over 90,000 new customers a month
- 1.4 Million SQL Databases are held in Microsoft Azure
- More than 50 Trillion storage objects in Microsoft Azure
- Over 425 Million Azure Active Directory users
- 3,200 Azure Marketplace applications are available
Trying to keep up to date in all things Microsoft Azure is a full time job. To make things slightly easier Microsoft offer a Cloud Platform Roadmap which enables you to see the upcoming applications, services and infrastructure items.
Final Thought
Microsoft Azure is complicated, you often have a number of ways to achieve the same end results. Hopefully this upcoming series of blog posts will provide you with the concepts that underpin Microsoft’s cloud service offering.
VMFocus 