Getting started with Microsoft Azure
The
purpose of this ebook is to help you understand the fundamentals of Microsoft
Azure so you can hit the ground running when you start using it.
With an Azure account, you can work through the demos in this book and use them as hands-on labs. If you don’t have an Azure account, you can sign up for a free trial at azure.microsoft.com. If you have an MSDN subscription, you can activate the included Azure benefits and use the associated monthly credit.
You can also check out Purchase Options at https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/purchase-options/ and Member Offers at https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/member-offers/ (for members of MSDN, the Microsoft Partner Network, BizSpark, and other Microsoft programs).
What is Azure?
The following will give an overview of
Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.
Overview
of cloud computing
Cloud computing
provides a modern alternative to the traditional on-premises datacenter. A
public cloud vendor is completely responsible for hardware purchase and
maintenance and provides a wide variety of platform services that you can use.
You lease whatever hardware and software services you require on an as-needed
basis, thereby converting what had been a capital expense for hardware purchase
into an operational expense. It also allows you to lease access to hardware and
software resources that would be too expensive to purchase. Although you are
limited to the hardware provided by the cloud vendor, you only have to pay for
it when you use it.
Cloud environments provide an online
portal experience, making it easy for users to manage compute, storage,
network, and application resources. For example, in the Azure portal, a user
can create a virtual machine (VM) configuration specifying the following: the
VM size (with regard to CPU, RAM, and local disks), the operating system, any
predeployed software, the network configuration, and the location of the VM.
The user then can deploy the VM based on that configuration and within a few
minutes access the deployed VM. This quick deployment
compares favorably
with the previous mechanism for deploying a physical machine, which could take
weeks just for the procurement cycle.
In addition to the public cloud just described, there are private and hybrid clouds. In a private cloud, you create a cloud environment in your own datacenter and provide self-service access to compute resources to users in your organization. This offers a simulation of a public cloud to your users, but you remain completely responsible for the purchase and maintenance of the hardware and software services you provide.
A hybrid cloud integrates public and private clouds,
allowing you to host workloads in the most appropriate location. For example,
you could host a high-scale website in the public cloud and link it to a highly
secure database hosted in your private cloud (or on-premises datacenter).
Microsoft provides support for public, private, and hybrid clouds. Microsoft Azure, the focus of this book, is a public cloud. Microsoft Azure Stack is an add-on to Windows Server 2016 that allows you to deploy many core Azure services in your own datacenter and provides a self-service portal experience to your users.
You can integrate these into a hybrid cloud through the use of a virtual private network.