When Windows Azure came online to the general public in February 2010 there were solely database services, websites, and virtual machine hosting available. Over time, Microsoft constantly added features and new services to Azure, and, as there were more and more offers for Linux and other non-Windows services, Microsoft decided in April 2014 to rename Windows Azure as Microsoft Azure. This supported Microsoft's commitment to transform itself into a services company, which means that, in order to be successful, you have to offer as many services as possible to as many clients as possible. Since then, Microsoft has constantly improved and released new services. Additionally, it constantly builds and expand its data centers all over the world.
Note
The service updates happen very frequently. That is the reason why you need to keep yourself informed. For example, the database offer you are using could have improved storage or performance capabilities. Information sources are the official Microsoft Azure Blog and the Azure Twitter channel. Furthermore, information can be found on the websites of several Azure MVPs.
Azure offers many services in its cloud computing platform. These services include the following:
The service categories, differentiated between platform services and infrastructure services, are as follows:
- Management: The management services include the management portal, the marketplace with the services gallery, and the components to automate things in Azure.
- Services compute: Services compute are the Azure cloud services that are basically PaaS offers for developers to quickly build and deploy highly scalable applications. The service fabric and Azure RemoteApp are also in this category.
- Security: Containing all the services that provide identity in Azure, such as the Azure Active Directory, multi-factor authentication, and the key vault that is a safe place for your certificates.
- Integration: The integration services include interface services such as BizTalk and Azure Service Bus, but also message helpers such as storage queues.
- Media and CDN: These are basically two services. One is the CDN that makes it possible to build your own content delivery network based on Azure. The other is the media services that make it very easy to use and process different media with the help of Azure.
- Web and mobile: These include all the services that assist in creating apps or backend services for web and mobile; for example, web apps and API apps.
- Developer services: These are cloud-based development tools for version control, collaboration, and other development-related tasks. The Azure SDK is a part of the developer services.
- Data: The data services contain all the different database types that you can deploy in Azure (SQL, DocumentDB, MongoDB, Table storage and so on) and diverse tools to configure them.
- Analytics and IoT: As the name suggests, analytics services are tools to analyze and process data. This offers a broad range of possibilities from machine learning to stream analytics. These can, but don't have to, build on certain data services. Internet of Things (IoT) services include the fundamental tools needed to work with devices used for the IoT such as the Raspberry Pi 2.
- Hybrid operations: This category sums up all the remaining services that could not clearly be categorized. These include backup, monitoring, and disaster recovery as well as many others.
- Platform Services:
- Infrastructure services:
- Operating system and server compute: This category consists of compute containers. It includes virtual machine containers and, additionally, the container services that are quite new to the product range.
- Storage: Storage services are the two main storage types: BLOB and file storage. They have different pricing tiers depending on the speed and latency of the storage ordered. Storage is looked at in detail in Chapter 6, Planning and Deploying Virtual Machines in Azure.
- Networking: This category consists of the basic networking resources. Examples are Load Balancer, ExpressRoute, and VPN Gateways.
The important thing is to remember that we are talking about a rapidly changing and very agile cloud computing platform. After this chapter, if you have not already done so, you should start using Azure by experimenting, exploring, and implementing your solutions, while reading the correlating chapters.
For testing purposes, you should use the Azure Free Trial (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/offers/ms-azr-0044p/), Visual Studio Dev Essentials (https://www.visualstudio.com/dev-essentials/) or the included Azure amount from a MSDN subscription.