Cloud Basics: Azure

Cloud is a set of services that helps you with your software development lifecycle, from development to build to deploy to secure to monitor. Any cloud service provider will provide multiple services, basic ones would be Compute, Storage, and Networking.

Azure Provides the following set of services.

Compute

  • VMs (IaaS)
  • Azure App Service (PaaS)
  • Containers
  • AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service)
  • Azure Functions (Serverless, Pay as you use)

Storage

  • Blob storage (Object Storage) – Hot Tier/ Archive Tier
  • File Storage
  • Data Lake Storage – Hadoop Compatible
  • SQL Database
  • Azure DB for open source
  • Azure Cosmos DB (No-SQL)
  • Azure Cache for Redis

Networking

  • VNet
  • Subnets
  • VNet Peering
  • Azure VPN
  • Azure Expres Route

There are three popular ways provided by Azure to interact with and manage services

The Azure portal: the portal is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that makes it convenient to locate the resource you need and execute any required changes.

The Azure CLI: The Azure CLI is a cross-platform command-line program to connect to Azure and execute administrative commands on Azure resources.

az vm create \
--resource-group CrmTestingResourceGroup \
--name CrmUnitTests \
--image UbuntuLTS
…

Azure PowerShell: Azure PowerShell is a module you add to PowerShell to let you connect to your Azure subscription and manage resources.

New-AzVm -ResourceGroupName "CrmTestingResourceGroup"
-Name "CrmUnitTests" `
-Image "UbuntuLTS"
…

Further Reading: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/solution-ideas/articles/cloud-native-apps