Microsoft Azure is one of the biggest cloud service providers worldwide, offering a wide range of services from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS. It fulfills all the characteristics that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describes for cloud computing. These are as follows:
- On-demand self-service: An automated deployment of resources that a consumer orders through an interface such as a consumer portal.
- Broad network access: Providing availability of cloud services through a standardized network interface that are, at best, accessible by several endpoint devices.
- Resource pooling: This means that the automated assignment and reassignment of diverse resources from various resource pools for individual customers is possible.
- Rapid elasticity: It is also known as rapid scaling, and describes the ability to scale resources in a massive way. The automatic and fast assignment and reassignment of resources, and rapid up- and down-scaling of single instances are keywords when talking about rapid elasticity. The adjustment of web server resources depending on the demand is an example of rapid elasticity.
- Measured service: All usage data for consumer resources is monitored and reported to be available for consumers and the cloud provider. This is one of the requirements for minute-based billing.