Introduction
In this article, we will explore the pillars of the Microsoft Azure cloud.
I will be adding more articles on the Azure cloud that will help you to move on further.
Scenario
These articles will help you to start the study of the Azure Cloud and go through them one by one. I will help you to go step by step in learning to accomplish this.
Prerequisite
Basic knowledge of software technology.
Background
Why use a cloud platform or cloud computing service?
Ans
Cloud helps us with the following major benefits,
- To rapidly set up your environments – Infrastructure, Software, etc.
- To scale up your applications to meet peak demands
- Increase daily activities & efficiency
- Automated elasticity approach on demand
- Efficient scalability
- High availability
- Suitable pricing models
- Automation, monitoring, deployment
- Reduce cost
- Focus on business functionality
- Access applications from any time, anywhere
List of cloud providers
- AWS (Amazon Web Servers)
- Microsoft Azure cloud
- Google Cloud
- Vmware
- Terremark
- Rackspace
- Digital Ocean
- Joyent
- IBM Cloud
Does the cloud focus on functionality?
- More geographic options - Datacenters
- OS - installation, licensing, updates, patches
- High availability, scalability, load balancing
- Enterprise Integration
- Security
- Network
- Maintenance & Fault tolerance
- Efficient Storage
- Intelligence Analytics
- Serverless Computing
- Language supports (.NET, JAVA, PHP, Python, C, C++, etc.)
- Promotes Agility (continued integrations/deployments)
- Environments (staging, production)
- IoT, Analytics
- Resource management
What is an Azure cloud?
- “Microsoft Azure is a flexible cloud platform/ cloud computing service by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.”
- Simple words – ‘Cloud Service by Microsoft’
- Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure
- Released on February 1, 2010
- Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help your organization meet your business needs and challenges.
Azure cloud data centers
Azure Cloud provides more regional data centers than any other cloud provider (54 geographic regions worldwide, 140 countries as of Oct 2018, and its growing)
Below is a screenshot from Microsoft explaining data center availability,
![Data center]()
Pillars of the Azure cloud
It is very important to understand the pillars of the cloud in depth which will help you with design considerations of your application,
- Compute
- Storage
- Networking and Content Delivery
- Database
- Analytics and Big Data
- Intelligence
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Management & Monitoring
- Mobile Services
- Security, Identity & Access
- Developer Tools
- Enterprise Integrations
- Hybrid Cloud
- User-friendliness
- Data Centers
- Availability
- Pricing Options
- Disaster Recovery
In the next article, I will be describing the individual pillars in detail.