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, Azure stack, which is an implementation of private cloud from Microsoft, will release soon. This will have the same features available on private cloud as that on a public cloud. They both will, in fact, connect and work seamlessly and transparently together. It is very easy to get started with Azure, but also developers and architects can fall into a trap if they do not design and architect their solutions appropriately. This book is an attempt to provide guidance and directions towards 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 Azure Resource Manager 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, locks, and more 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.
Next chapter will discuss some of the important patterns that help in solving common cloud-based deployment problems and ensure the application is secure, available, scalable, and maintainable in long run.