The Microsoft Azure platform
Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's application platform for the public cloud. Microsoft Azure offers mainly IaaS and PaaS services, but also Software as a service (SaaS) is covered (Office 365 runs on Azure, Dynamics 365 applications runs on Azure, Azure websites can serve as SaaS offerings as well by permitting you to configure and run applications such as WordPress in a few minutes).
The following screenshot shows the main differences between an on-premise infrastructure and IaaS or PaaS architectures:
Microsoft Azure is now generally available in 30 regions around the world and the platform is continuously growing (in terms of geographic expansion and the features offered). This is the actual Azure data centers map (with regions covered) provided by Microsoft:
This global network of data centers guarantees high levels of availability and SLAs and data redundancy (locally redundancy in the user's primary region or geo-redundancy in a secondary region).
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