Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud computing framework that includes software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It provides huge number of azure services and supports numerous operating systems, databases and software for developers. And, even better, for Azure-based environments, we actually integrate with Microsoft Azure to help on-call teams enhance incident response. Lets dive in for azure services overview :
In this blog series I will try to give you overview of the Azure resources available in different categories, such as computing, storage, and networking with some practical examples
The List of Microsoft Azure Services
Contents
1) Azure Application Services
This includes services you can use to help create and run your software, such as Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Distributed System Link Service Bus, Big Data Processing HDInsight, Azure Scheduler, and Azure Media Services.
On the Azure platform, Azure application services allow you to build, deploy and manage different applications. These include Azure AI, Azure Analytics, Azure IoT, Azure Media Services, Azure Active Directory (AD), and Azure Scheduler.
1.1 Azure AI
Microsoft Azure allows the AI teams to access AI resources easily and lets you connect with clients, inspire your staff, and organizationally optimize business processes. On Azure’s AI Platform, your developers can generate interactive applications that deliver AI capabilities such as NLP, speech recognition, voice synthesis, face detection, video indexing, and text analytics.
In addition, on various platforms, Microsoft Azure Bot Service releases intelligent agents (website, facebook messenger, skype, email, SMS, etc.) that can be used to build smart chat applications.
1.2 Azure Analytics
With Azure’s analytics suite, you can process and analyze vast amounts of data to make well-informed, strategic business decisions. It enables the analytics team to conduct complex queries through large data sets and gain actionable insights.
Supported by Apache, the analytics solution provides the data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts working on joint projects with an immersive real-time workspace that helps them to conduct real-time analysis of massive data sets on different topics quickly.
1.3 Azure Internet of Things (IoT)
Without reinventing the wheel, Azure IoT provides the company with platforms and software that can help you create IoT solutions. The IoT Central (SaaS) of Azure provides pre-configured solutions, while “Azure IoT solution accelerators” provide more flexibility for your company to create a custom solution. The Azure IoT Centre, which supports Azure IoT Central and Azure IoT solution accelerators, is the main platform (PaaS).
In addition, Azure IoT provides various SDKs and integration support for connecting a variety of IoT devices with advanced analytics and visualization to gather insights from incoming data.
2) Azure Data Service
Cloud information is processed and handled by Azure data services. A number of data resources are included in Microsoft Azure: Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database, Azure DocumentDB, Azure StorSimple, and Azure Redis Cache.
Below is an overview of one of the most prevalent data services offered by Microsoft Azure, Azure Storage?
2.1 Azure Storage
The data storage service offered by Microsoft Azure provides stable and flexible cloud storage for both structured and unstructured data. Your data protection experts will ensure stable integration of your on-premise data with cloud data using Azure Storage.
Multiple storage options like blob, queue, disk, and NoSQL are provided by Azure Storage. Without affecting the production environment, you can store any size of data, from a small size blob to a large file, as per your business requirement.
3) Azure Development Service
To improve the overall software creation and deployment process, Microsoft Azure provides various development tools and services. Here’s a quick look at one of the essential Microsoft services, i.e. Azure DevOps, which allows continuous customer delivery.
3.1 Azure DevOps
By offering an alternative to the self-managed CI/CD servers and open source DevOps tools, Azure DevOps automates the software delivery process and boosts your software creation. With its fast and reliable tools, Microsoft Azure DevOps technology will help you with hassle-free delivery. It is an extensible framework that can extend the current tools and IDEs and provide hundreds of marketplace integrations.
4) Azure Compute Service
The hosting services responsible for hosting and operating the application workloads are Azure computing services. These include Virtual Machines (VMs) from Azure, Azure Container Service, Azure App Services, Azure Batch, and ServiceFabric from Azure. Here is a brief notice on two of the Azure Compute Systems most commonly used: Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) and Azure Container Service:
4.1 Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)
A Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine (VM) is a scalable computing resource that is on demand. You don’t need to purchase any physical hardware and bear the cost of its maintenance; you have virtualization versatility. Your cloud administrators just need to choose the operating system, install the appropriate resources and build the web server within a few minutes. All this is finished.
4.2 Azure Container Service
Azure allows you to exploit the new architecture of container-based programming practices and microservices. With Azure Service Fabric, you can move your .NET applications to microservices using Windows Server containers. In addition, you can scale and orchestrate Linux containers using the Azure Kubernetes service.
5) Azure Network Services
Azure Network Services applies to those services that function within Azure and between Azure and on-site infrastructure networking operations. These include Azure Virtual Network, Azure ExpressRoute, DNS supported by Azure, Azure Traffic Manager and Azure Network Content Delivery (CDN).
5.1 Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)
By offering high bandwidth content and reducing the file download time, Azure CDN enables the delivery of large files. This caches the file to an Azure data center nearest to the geographic location of the user. It therefore reduces the latency to a large extent and reduces the load on application by relieving it from the entire content delivery process.
Summary : This comprises the azure services overview in well defined way. In the next couple of blog I will explain about each of these azure services in the detail.
Deepak Goyal is certified Azure Cloud Solution Architect. He is having around decade and half experience in designing, developing and managing enterprise cloud solutions. He is also Big data certified professional and passionate cloud advocate.