Azure Fundamentals— Beginners Guide

Azure Portal Overview

When we talk about azure its one of the famous cloud provider and has lot of offerings under its shell. In this article we will be talking about azure fundamentals and give an overview if your business needs to shift to azure from on-premise infrastructure and how azure can help to shift your business goals.

Here is a sneak peek into the pointers this article focuses on:

1. What is Azure
2. Describe the basic concepts of cloud computing
3. What are some cloud computing advantages?
4. Determine whether Azure is the right solution for your business needs.

What is Azure

Azure is a cloud computing platform with an ever-expanding set of services to help you build solutions to meet your business goals. Azure services range from simple web services for hosting your business presence in the cloud to running fully virtualized computers for you to run your custom software solutions. Azure provides a wealth of cloud-based services like remote storage, database hosting, and centralized account management. Azure also offers new capabilities like AI and Internet of Things (IoT).

Basic Concepts of Cloud Computing

It’s the delivery of computing services over the internet, which is otherwise known as the cloud. These services include servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence. Cloud computing offers faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet by using a pay-as-you-go pricing model. You typically pay only for the cloud services you use, which helps you:

• Lower your operating costs.
• Run your infrastructure more efficiently.
• Scale as your business needs change.

To put it another way, cloud computing is a way to rent compute power and storage from someone else’s datacenter. You can treat cloud resources like you would your resources in your own datacenter. When you’re done using them, you give them back. You’re billed only for what you use.

Instead of maintaining CPUs and storage in your datacenter, you rent them for the time that you need them. The cloud provider takes care of maintaining the underlying infrastructure for you. The cloud enables you to quickly solve your toughest business challenges, and bring cutting-edge solutions to your users.

Cloud Computing Advantages

There are several benefits that a cloud environment has over a physical environment. For example, cloud-based applications employ a myriad of related strategies:

• Reliability: Depending on the service-level agreement that you choose, your cloud-based applications can provide a continuous user experience with no apparent downtime even when things go wrong.
• Scalability: Applications in the cloud can be scaled in two ways, while taking advantage of autoscaling: Vertically: Computing capacity can be increased by adding RAM or CPUs to a virtual machine. Horizontally: Computing capacity can be increased by adding instances of a resource, such as adding more virtual machines to your configuration.
• Elasticity: Cloud-based applications can be configured to always have the resources they need.
• Agility: Cloud-based resources can be deployed and configured quickly as your application requirements change.
• Geo-distribution: Applications and data can be deployed to regional datacenters around the globe, so your customers always have the best performance in their region.
• Disaster recovery: By taking advantage of cloud-based backup services, data replication, and geo-distribution, you can deploy your applications with the confidence that comes from knowing that your data is safe in the event that disaster should occur.

Determine whether Azure is the right solution for your business needs.

The cloud helps you move faster and innovate in ways that were once nearly impossible.

In our ever-changing digital world, two trends emerge:

• Teams deliver new features to their users at record speeds.
• Users expect an increasingly rich and immersive experience with their devices and with software.

Software releases were once scheduled in terms of months or even years. Today, teams release features in smaller batches that are often scheduled in days or weeks. Some teams even deliver software updates continuously — sometimes with multiple releases within the same day.

Think of all the ways you interact with devices that you couldn’t do a few years ago. Many devices can recognize your face and respond to voice commands. Augmented reality changes the way you interact with the physical world. Household appliances are even beginning to act intelligently. These technologies are only a few examples, and many of them are powered by the cloud.

To power your services and deliver innovative and novel user experiences more quickly, the cloud provides on-demand access to:

• A nearly limitless pool of raw compute, storage, and networking components.
• Speech recognition and other cognitive services that help make your application stand out from the crowd.
• Analytics services that deliver telemetry data from your software and devices.