Microsoft Azure

What it is

Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud. It offers the same categories as any other provider — virtual machines, storage, networking, managed databases, functions — but it is strongest where an organisation already runs Microsoft software, because its identity system is the same one those organisations use for email and desktops. Where AWS grew from selling infrastructure, Azure grew from extending the enterprise estate into someone else’s datacentre.

Why it matters

For a company whose staff, servers and directories are already Microsoft, Azure is often the shortest path: existing identities, existing licences and existing tooling carry over, and the people who administer them keep their skills. That advantage is real and frequently decisive. It is also a trap if it becomes the only reason for a decision that should be about the workload, so it is worth knowing where Azure is genuinely strong and where it is merely familiar.

In this track

1. Enterprise identity and Active Directory (06-cloud-devops/03-microsoft-azure/01-enterprise-identity-and-active-directory) — why directory-integrated identity is Azure’s centre of gravity.
2. Running workloads on Azure (06-cloud-devops/03-microsoft-azure/02-running-workloads-on-azure) — the compute, storage and platform services a workload is assembled from.

Prerequisites

• Cloud Computing (06-cloud-devops/01-cloud-computing)

Go deeper

• Cloud Computing (06-cloud-devops/01-cloud-computing) — the concepts this provider implements, so read it first.
• AWS (06-cloud-devops/02-aws) — the largest provider and the yardstick most comparisons use.
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) (06-cloud-devops/04-google-cloud-platform-gcp) — the third major provider, strongest where data and Kubernetes are the centre of the problem.