A Gentle Introduction to the Azure platform
Azure from Microsoft is one of the few popular cloud platforms out in the market. This article lays out a field guide to the vastness of this platform. If you would like to know about cloud computing in general, checkout the blog titled A gentle introduction to cloud computing.
In this section, let us take a closer look at the Azure platform and the services it provides. Azure provides over a 100 services which it groups into 8 categories:
- compute services: VMs, containers, serverless, kubernetes, Azure batch, Azure functions
- cloud storage: disk attached to VMs, file shares, DBs, blob storage, queue storage, SQL and noSQL DBs
- networking: private networks to on-prem
- app hosting: run webapps on Windows or Linux, and a marketplace of other services
- AI: cognitive services - Azure ML service, ML studio
- IoT: integrate sensors into your cloud, build dashboards etc
- integration: logic apps, service bus, workflow orchestration
- security: identity services, intelligence monitoring
Look at the platform help doc under the picture for a table.
Account types
The first 12 months of account creation gives us free access. After this, it is a pay-as-you-go model. However there are 25 services that will always be free.