What is Azure?
Azure is a Services Platform, a comprehensive set of storage, computing and networking infrastructure Services, which resides in a network of datacenters.
or
Azure is basically nothing but an on-demand data center for everyone, which means that you only get what you ask for.
If you need a Service for 15 minutes or 15 days, you will get it and you pay accordingly.
Azure saves us from the infrastructure cost, weekly or monthly maintenance of it and we don’t have to worry about the unexpected issue with the Server as Microsoft provides 99.9% uptime for it.
Thus, Azure comes with 3 Services, which are given below.
- IAAS – Infrastructure as a Service.
- PAAS – Platform as a Service.
- SAAS – Software as a Service.
The image given below will help you to understand how these Services work.
![Azure]()
Source: Google
In the first row, you can see Packaged Software, which is nothing other than your On-Premise Infrastructure.
Thus, if you have it, then you must manage/maintain everything starting from Networking to an Application.
For example
We do monthly patching of the Server. We have to make sure that the storage is in place for back-up. We should do all networking set-up etc.
IAAS
In this, we don’t have to worry about networking, storage, Server and virtualization. These will be taken care by Microsoft. The rest of the things we have to maintain (ex: operating system should be updated at regular interval).
PAAS
In PAAS, we only maintain an application and data. The rest will be done by Microsoft. Thus, we make sure that our date Application is up and running, and our data has been backed up without any issues.
SAAS
In this, we don’t have to worry about anything, everything will be done by Microsoft -- patching, updates, data backup at the regular interval etc. The best example of SAAS is Offics 365.
I hope this helps you in understanding Azure as Services.
Happy SharePointing.