Chapter 1: Exploring the Microsoft Azure Cloud

People often get confused due to the ambiguity surrounding the term cloud computing. Here, we are not referring to cloud storage solutions such as OneDrive, Dropbox, and so on. Instead, we are referring to actual computing solutions that are used by organizations, companies, or even individuals.

Microsoft Azure (previously known as Windows Azure) is Microsoft's public cloud computing platform. It offers a wide range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage, networking, and more. If you go through the list of services offered by Azure, you'll see that you can work with practically anything—from virtual machines to artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Starting with a brief history of virtualization, we will explain how the transformation of physical hardware into virtualized hardware made it possible to go beyond the borders of classic datacenters in many ways.

After that, we'll explain the different terminology used in cloud technology.

Here is the list of key topics that we'll cover:

• Virtualization of compute, network, and storage
• Cloud services
• Cloud types