There are many cloud computing platforms offered by different organizations such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and so on. Windows Azure is one of them, and is provided by Microsoft Azure.
Azure is described as the managed data centers that are used to build, deploy, and manage the applications and provide services through a global network. Platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are the services provided by Microsoft Azure. It supports majority of the programming languages.
Azure provides platforms to clients to develop and deploy software without worrying about the server infrastructure and configuration. You can focus on the development of the application and leave the infrastructure worries to Azure.
One of the key perks of using Azure is the overall cost, which is low as the resources are allocated on demand and servers are automatically updated. Azure provides automatic updates to avoid security issues, and it does all that in the background without affecting the application.
Azure provides a managed compute service that gives complete control of the operating systems and the application platform stack to the application developers. It provides developers with control over the data center and allows them to manage it.
This is the ideal case for projects where complete control is required. The virtual machine can be completely altered to the requirements of the project or business. However, if not managed carefully, it could become troublesome; all the security updates then become the job of the developer who manages the infrastructure.
The maintenance of the legacy application also sometimes becomes difficult due to operating system and application stack updates.