![Azure]()
It is intended for anyone who want to learn about azure or want to shift to azure for their virtualization needs.
Pre-Requisites
Before diving into Azure you should have basic knowledge of the following topics:
- Software redundancy
- SQL
- Client-Server architecture
- Load balancing
- Virtualization
You don't have to be expert in any of these, basic knowledge and sound concepts would be enough to make you move along.
Why Azure?
Microsoft Azure took virtualization to a whole new level. It is just impossible to state its innovation in a sentence. Azure provides all those services that any customer can only think of. The following are some amazing features of Azure:
- Speedy
- Simplified portal for administrator/user
- Affordable
- Handles websites, web services, VMs, data storage/backup, etc.
- Supports IaaS, SaaS & PaaS
- Scaling up is quick and easy.
- Auto-scaling (pay-as-you-go)
- Support hybrid approach (You can use azure as well as some other platform for a single application)
- Very much cost effective as compared to building your own data center.
- Opportunities for everyone (Small and Large organizations)
Scope of Azure Services
Scope of Azure services are massive. You may consider it just a "marketing term", so for explanation purposes let us consider a scenario where you've a website which you want to run on cloud using azure. Services you'd get are listed below:
- Hosting
- Data backup
- Storage (Azure SQL)
- Traffic manger
- Authentication (Azure AD)
- Traffic manager
- Code sharing for agile development (VS online)
- Machine learning
- Content delivery network
- Push notifications
- I'm sure I've forgot something
Just imagine, all these services (and many more) at one platform.
Pricing
You can even start for free . It supports both "on-demand" and "pay-as-you-go" model. You can use this awesome pricing calculator to get an estimate as per your requirements.
Startups can apply for BizSpark subscription with which you can get $150/month. You can check its details here.
Learning Resources
Azure is under heavy development. Sometimes it gets tough to keep oneself updated with every announcement regarding services or pricing. So here are few tricks that you can do to follow along: