The cloud is not more than 10 years old. It is a new paradigm and still in its nascent stage. There will be a lot of innovation and capabilities added over time. Azure is one of the top cloud providers today and it provides rich capabilities through IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and hybrid deployments. In fact, the Azure stack, which is an implementation of the private cloud from Microsoft, will be released soon. This will have the same features available on a private cloud as on the public cloud. They both will, in fact, connect and work seamlessly and transparently together.
It is very easy to get started with Azure, but developers and architects can also fall into a trap if they do not design and architect their solutions appropriately. This book is an attempt to provide guidance and directions toward architecting solutions the right way, using appropriate services and resources. Every service on Azure is a resource. It is important to understand how these resources are organized and managed in Azure. This chapter provided context around ARM and groups—the core framework that provides building blocks for resources. It provides a set of services to resources that help provide uniformity, standardization, and consistency in managing them. The services, such as RBAC, tags, policies, and locks, are available to every resource provider and resource. Azure also provides rich automation features to automate and interact with resources. Tools such as PowerShell, ARM templates, and Azure CLI can be incorporated as part of release pipelines and continuous deployment and delivery. Users can connect to Azure from heterogeneous environments using these automation tools.
The next chapter will discuss some of the important architectural concerns that help solve common cloud-based deployment problems and ensure the application is secure, available, scalable, and maintainable in the long run.